Tips for installation and customization of Open-Realty

Nov 15, 2007 19:02 GMT  ·  By

The real estate industry represents the most profitable direction of services development. The traditional marketing methods in real estate have changed in favor of those Internet based.

As a consequence any real estate firm or agency must have one more web site, that will permit them to survive to the present concurrence in the field. Usually personalized real estate web site design costs a lot of money, but for anyone who wants to put a real estate business online, free alternatives exist.

Open-Realty is a free application that allows you to have an online real estate agency. Practically, you can manage real estate listings from an easy to use administration panel. The installation is easy, you must just have a web server PHP enabled and define a single MySQL database. Then after a successful installation you will be able to login to the Open-Realty administration panel in order to customize various aspects of your new real estate web site. For example, you can change the listings template, property classes, members and agents accounts and more.

Among the many advantages provided by this PHP/MySQL application, such as virtual tours, google maps integration, vcards, there is also the possibility of implementation of multilanguage support. The website frontend can be translated into your language or any other language you need.

The primary web site language is established from the first Open-Realty installation step. For example, if you choose as default the English language, the web site front end and back end translation will be determined by the file lang.inc.php which can be found by following the next path: include/language/en. You can translate this file to localize the site content in your language or to provide multilingual versions of your listings.

You will discover that Open Realty application can also be easily customized from many other points of view (such as changing the basic templates structure), without advanced knowledge of PHP and MySQL programming being necessary.