Posted by movemaine on March 16, 2011 at 11:26am
How did you guys organize your taxonomy for your real estate site?
I'm looking at it and trying to figure out the best approach...
Quick Question
How did you guys organize your taxonomy for your real estate site?
I'm looking at it and trying to figure out the best approach...
Comments
Taxonomy
Hi movemaine -
I wanted to be able to use the taxonomy to create RSS feeds and SEO friendly URLs for both listings and searches. So to that end I've used City, County, Property Type, Bedrooms and Price. I generally get something like:
House: /real-estate/brownville/100-quarry-avenue
Search: /real-estate-listings/portland/single-family-home/200000-250000
Using taxonomy has created a situation where the data is less than perfectly normalized, (similar data in more than one location) but I figured it was worth it to leverage the power that taxonomy came with.
Those who will not reason, are bigots.
Those who can not, are fools.
Those who dare not, are slaves. - Lord Byron
Gotcha. Seems like a good
Gotcha. Seems like a good approach.
Now how does that play in with vocabulary? I don't quite have a grasp on the difference...
Taxonomy Vocabulary Terms
Hi movemaine -
Taxonomy is more or less the the catagorizing system as a whole.
City, County, Property Type, Bedrooms and Price are the vocabularies. Under each are the respective set of terms.
City:
Portland
Augusta
Bangor
Bedrooms:
1 Bedroom
2 Bedrooms
3 Bedrooms
4 Bedrooms and more
I have a simple real estate site here: www.mainehomes.com
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but if your not up to speed on this sort of thing you might be biting off more than you can chew trying a real estate site right off. If your a programmer I'd highly suggest buying and reading the book "Pro Drupal Development" as a place to start.
Have Fun - Bill
Those who will not reason, are bigots.
Those who can not, are fools.
Those who dare not, are slaves. - Lord Byron
Nice Site, Bill
Clean and simple, but really useful. Nice.
I like the mouseover images, for sure. Standard stuff, but nice layout.
Hey Bill, thanks for the
Hey Bill,
thanks for the responses.
Drupal is new to me, but I am used to programming within CMS's - I've developed several real estate sites in Joomla and Wordpress. But I'm tired of the constraints of both of them, and I spend more time hacking together things and then troubleshooting my hack. I realize that Drupal can be similar, however I feel it's more powerful in the long run. I want to learn a CMS that I can build anything in. Currently, when developing a client site I look at their requested features and their priority and then choose my cms based on which cms does priority A & B better? It's a frustrating process, as you can imagine.
So I figure I need to learn Drupal ASAP. I'm also a jump in kind of guy, I learn better that way and it sticks.
I do have that book and I am going to start with it tonight, as I just finished reading Apress's Visual Drupal book to get the basics.
Being that you are in Maine, can I pick your brain occasionally?
Do you work directly for DownEast, or are you a contractor? It looks as though their site is in Drupal as well - Are they using OpenPublish?
Down East
Hi movemaine -
Welcome to Drupal, the best CMS in the universe. This platform is the balls. Really, it is.
Ayuh, I work for Down East. Were almost completely Drupal, (about 15 Drupal sites). Our store is Magento, our bug reporting system is Mantis, we have a PHPBB bulletin board, (moving to VBulletin soon) and we have 3 legacy apps that I'm trying to migrate to Drupal when I get the time.
I don't know how your going to get your listings into your site but the syndication is pretty hairy, (hundreds of brokers, thousands of agents, tens of thousands of listings and a million images). There are 2 sources for the data in Maine ListHub and IDX. ListHub pushes an xml file and IDX uses a RETS server so you can to pull updated listings. The initial load on a server can be pretty high. Once the system is primed it's not as resource intensive but then it's a bear to debug. Also, recovering from a syndication error can bring you back to square one.
I don't know what OpenPublish is, so you can assume we don't use it. I've written the modules for our magazines, (I think they were the first modules I wrote).
Feel free to ask me anything, but be forewarned I'm not real communicative a lot of the time, (I put my battery into my phone about once a week).
Have Fun - Bill
Those who will not reason, are bigots.
Those who can not, are fools.
Those who dare not, are slaves. - Lord Byron
Very impressive mass of data
Very impressive mass of data to be managing.
I asked about OpenPublish because it is a new drupal distribution specifically for media outlets:
http://openpublishapp.com/
Looks pretty interesting, and your layout is similar to what they have incorporated - hence, my question.
The good news for me is that I won't be using any syndication feeds to import properties.
Eventually, I may set up the idx for rizzomattson.com, but right now I have them on a joomla solution, but I would like to move from that eventually.
Thanks foe the words of encouragement - much appreciated.