We have a major update to the realivent wordpress CMA Plugin, I'd like to say it when from "great" to "Holy Cow, this is awesome".

The biggest improvement is the new feature that allows people to guess on future home values. A new form has been added to the plugin that allows people to choose a future date anywhere from tomorrow to years from now and then enter a price that they think the property will be valued at. The valuation is coming from Zillow, just like the old plugin.

What makes this such a valuable tool, is that when the future date arrives for the estimation, that user gets an email with a link to see the results back on your website. This means constant traffic coming back to your website! Even if they completely forget about you, they will be reminded to go back to your site and see how good they are at guessing prices.

It is really a lot of fun.
Screenshots:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

This feature is in beta and you can turn it off in the admin section. All data is stored and we will be producing data trends based on the guesses. This data will not be available immediately because we do not have that much data, but as we start seeing some interesting trends we will release the data. The data will be release in the plugin also, so the public will stay on your site (sticky) and see how the world is estimating values.

Since Zestimates update about every 2 weeks, if you enter a future date in the near future and the Zestimate has not been updated, an email will get sent out telling the person that made the estimate that the value has not changed, and they will get another email as soon as it does. 

Along with this feature we have improved many other features:

1. Better look and feel. Of course you can also edit the code to fit your website.
2. Along with the default sidebar widget, we added a function to pull out the form so you can skin with you own sidebar container. See screenshot above.
   to skin, call the form with this function: <?PHP get_cma_widget_form() ?>
3. better results. Removed many of the errors from missing data.
4. added a permalink to the results. You can now get the permalink and use as a reference when blogging about house values, or send to clients in emails. Here is an example of the permalink: Upcoming auctions in Oakland, CA

Download the plugin here: Realivent CMA plugin

typical plugin install, upload entire folder to your plugin directory, and activate. Go to options->realivent cma to configure. The Options page will make a new wordpress page automatically. To add the widget, go to presentation0>sidebar widgets and drag the realivent cma widget to your sidebar. 

Popularity: 70% [?]

I don't know why most themes don't have page templates included, but they should. Many times you will create a new Wordpress page, then go view it and the page is all funky because of the sidebar. The easiest solution is to save the page.php file as another filename, preferably, page_no_sidebar.php to keep it simple, and then remove the sidebar from the new file. Here are the steps to do this.

Before we go any further, you will have to be able to access your wordpress theme files, so basically this cannot be done on a shared wordpress site, such as wordpress.com or propblogs.com (I edit most of the themes on propblogs so you can choose page templates, so you do not need this tutorial if you use propblogs)

This is for a basic theme, some themes can get pretty tricky...if you can't figure it out, let me know. I can figure it out for you. 

You are most likely going to edit 2 files. The style.css and the page.php file. You do not need to know any PHP for this, and you can do all the edits with notepad. Do not use microsoft word, it will just mess everything up for you. If you plan to do more customization to the themes, I suggest getting a professional editor. I use Dreamweaver, but there are many others.

first, let's edit the page.php file and make a template so you can use it over and over.

This is the default page.php file

Pretty simple...remove all the code in the middle, and you just have get_header, get_sidebar, and get_footer. The content in the middle display your page content. Save page.php as page_no_sidebar.php and then update it to look like this

Notice I removed get_sidebar, and I added a comment to the top of the file. Wordpress scans all files in the theme folders and when it comes across a keyword like "Template Name" it knows what to do with it. Wordpress will add this file to the template dropdown box.


Now you will not see the sidebar, but in most cases the main body of content will still not extend all the way across the page. you now need to edit the style.css file to make the main body fill the page. Open style.css and look for this: #primary-content. You see primary content in the main div tag in the above code. When you find it, look to see if there is a width attribute. If there is and it is 100%, you might not need to edit anything. If it is something like 500px, it is probably too narrow to fill the entire page. copy the entire section

then paste it right below the section and rename it to:

Make the width around 900px-1000px...you will have to play with this to get it right. Of course there are ways to make it perfect, but the majority of themes will all be different and this is just a basic tutorial.
Another attribute to look for is a margin, or padding attribute. If you see margin-right:200px...you will probably also need to change that to 0px. Again, you will probably have to play with it.
now go back to page_no_sidebar.php and change the div tag with id='primary-content' to id='primary-content-full-page'

now upload all files to the server and you should be golden.

BTW, I hold no responsibility if you take my advice and it ruins your website

Popularity: 12% [?]