PIRETS

I first mentioned the Precision Intermedia RETS module in this thread. Basically, it's a module which can fetch real estate listings via RETS and import them into a site as standard Drupal nodes. Since Ferndale Real Estate has gone live, PIRETS gone through a great amount of refactoring and updating, so much so that I now call it PIRETS 3. Much of the updates had to do with making sure the module could scale to handle large amounts of listings (our largest client's site so far is managing well over 20,000 listings, about eighteen times as many as the original client has), but there's some sweet new features as well, including:

• Everything is now a CCK field, including images. This means it's easy to do stuff like show everything using Views (including Views with exposed filters), enable faceted search on listings with Sphinx and the like, and use ImageCache to resize images. New feature: Locations can be stored in CCK Location fields, which makes it easier to do things like geolocation and adding maps to listings.
• Batch API is now used when force-updating a category's listings. This can reduce the occurrence of PHP or browser timeouts or PHP out-of-memory errors when force-updating a category's listings, particularly for the first time when potentially several thousand new nodes need to be created. (However, it may still take a couple of tries the first time if you have a whole lot of listings in a category and no way to easily increase PHP's timeout or memory allocation config values. Update: Recent improvements with how the module uses the Batch API to do most tasks have almost eliminated these problems. Also, if you're using Pathauto which in turn uses Token, see this issue.)
• Each property category can have a minimum "lifetime" before it is updated via a cron run. This means that you can have single-family properties update more frequently than commercial properties, for example. You can also easily disable fetching listings for properties you aren't interested in displaying.
• If you're configuring PIRETS yourself, a "configuration checklist" helps to walk you through all the steps required to get PIRETS properly up and running and ready to fetch properties.

Unfortunately, none of the sites using PIRETS 3 with these new features are live yet, but when one goes live, you can bet I'll be bragging about it.

I have spoken to my boss about finally getting this up as a D.o project, but unfortunately he'd still like to recoup a bit more of the significant development cost before we do so. So won't you please consider allowing us at Precision Intermedia build you a slick Drupal-powered real estate site? Update: PIRETS is now available to the public! Check out PIRETS.info for more, well, PIRETS info.

Please feel free to post a reply or contact me directly if you have any questions - especially technical ones. I'm totally up for bragging about how I got all this to work.