Easy Property Listings v3.0 Beta 4 is now available via the downloads page.
This is a major feature release that introduces new features and enhancements to Easy Property Listings, the Easy Property Listings API and the Easy Property Listings Add-On Framework.
This release has been a huge undertaking by the team here at Easy Property Listings and we are really excited that we are on the edge of releasing the new version to the WordPress and real estate communities. The plugin has grown by 30% with new code and we have ensured that everything is optimised and even with the new features we have improved the plugin performance through code optimisations.
This release also sets the stage for future add-ons currently in development that will be released in the near future.
Continue reading for a quick rundown of the new features and enhancements and we’d love for you to help us beta test the next feature release of Easy Property Listings!
Beta 4
Beta 4 includes internal documentation adjustments and is release ready
Contact and Lead Management System
Contact management and lead CRM has been added to the Easy Property Listings plugin and we are very excited to finally release this to you to use on your real estate websites.
Lead generation in real estate is a must online and we have created an easy to use CRM that allows you to track and communicate with your prospects as they make enquiries on your listings. If you already are using a CRM in your business then the contact system will allow us to create add-ons which will be able to pass the lead information directly into your real estate CRM provided yours has an API. This will help you streamline your daily lead generation and prospecting activities with your website.
The contact system has been designed to be easy to use and allow you to track and capture contact information on your listings.
Back when I was selling property I would frequently meet the same people at different properties that I had listed for sale and now you will be able to create a story around your potential buyer or seller shopping for an agent.
Simple and easy to use Contact Management System CRM
If you don’t have a Contact Management System or you use your iPhone/Outlook/Excel as your CRM this has been built for you.
Imagine you are at your open for inspection and have your iPad on you, all you need to do is visit the listing on your website while logged in and you will have a “agent only” form where you can add your contacts into your database.
This is especially effective when you are using an email marketing system like MailChimp or our Listing Alerts extension because you can automate your email prospecting and build a lead generation systems to feed your prospecting system and real estate listing business.
Contact Tags
We’ve created a neat tag system with the contact system so you can create tags so you can immediately see who you should be in touch with. Tag them hot, cold, warm, potential seller, add some colour and at a glance you will implement the 80/20 rule in your business and improve your success.
Already have a full featured CRM?
With the contact system you will be able to take advantage of great CRM’s like LockedOn, REX, MyDesktop, MailChimp and many others that have API’s that allow us to pass contact data directly from your website to your CRM. We are really excited with the possibilities of what the contact system can do for Real Estate websites running WordPress and Easy Property Listings. We are working on add-ons for several CRM’s and they will be released soon after the release of Easy Property Listings v3.0
Contact System Beta
The Contact system in Easy Property Listings 3.0 Beta 1 has some additional fine tuning required prior to release but its at a point where you can test it out while we make additional adjustments prior to full release.
Link Contact to Listing
The contact system allows you to link your listings with your seller or landlords so you can quickly get to your listings owners and keep them updated with the progress of their listing.
Reports
This release introduces a reports feature for you to track your listings, sales and rentals so you can visually see how your business is going at a glance.
Graphs are cool and they really can give you a quick picture of how you are going with your real estate business so you can see trends in your business to better prepare your prospecting. Real Estate can be a very seasonal business and when you can see the last 5 years of your listings on a graph you can plan ahead.
If you are running a business and have several sales and property manager staff you will be able to see how your business is going and track the KPI’s of your people.
We have additional enhancements planned for the reports moving forward so you can track commissions so you can see your sales and rental revenue.
Other Upgrades
Along with the new Contacts and Reports features we have been optimising code, adding many new filters and functions to the code base to make your site faster and allow developers to create any type of real estate website that they can imagine.
We’ve fixed some issues and improved the listing edit pages to slim them down a bit… I could all do with a bit of slimming down too 🙂
Many more changes have been made which are noted in the Change Log below.
Easy Property Listings Code Docs reference for developers
We’ve created a Docs site to document functions, classes and the code in Easy Property Listings that provides a better understanding of the functions and what they do so you can create your own add-ons or make changes to the websites you are building using Easy Property Listing.
How you can help test the beta
We need your help to test the new version of Easy Property Listings and if you can lend a hand it will help us release the plugin sooner and ensure that when you update your site will be better than ever.
We are continually testing the plugin and are extremely confident that when upgrading an existing site you will have no issues but the perfectionist in me wants to be extra sure.
Testing Procedure: Clone existing site
If you have a real estate website running Easy Property Listings the easiest way to test is to create a clone of the website on a development server. Download the latest beta and manually upload the beta to the plugins folder.
Next rename the folder of the current version /easy-property-listings to /easy-property-listings-2.3.1 and rename the beta version from /easy-property-listings-beta-1 to /easy-property-listings
Using these steps will be just like performing a plugin update. Next visit Dashboard > Plugins and you should see that Easy Property Listings v2.97 is the active version. Check over the site, test imports and compare to your live version.
Testing Procedure: Fresh Install
Create a testing site or use an existing site of yours to use. Download the latest beta and manually upload and activate the plugin from Dashboard > Plugins > Add New. Test out the new features and add some listings manually and/or importing.
How to Report Issues
If you encounter any bugs during your testing with widgets, shortcodes, operation please post the issue on the GitHub Issues tracker and please add the beta version in the issue title. Before posting check that your issue has not already been posted by another user.
Testing Contact System
We are still making some tweaks to the contact system and our primary goal is to make sure that existing features are working before launch.
Full Change Log
- New: Every epl_action present in the $_GET or $_POST is called using WordPress do_action function in init.
- Tweak: Radio options when adding listings converted to checkboxes to slim down the admin pages.
- Fix: Ducted Heating additional features now displays in feature list.
- Fix: Fully fenced option now displays in feature list.
- Tweak: Optimise Admin Listing queries.
- Tweak: Removed double display of Under Offer in admin listing list.
- Tweak: Leased rental listings now display the weekly rent amount in admin.
- Tweak: Commercial Lease listing details improved in admin list.
- Tweak: Sold price displays in admin.
- Fix: Date Available fix for year.
- New: epl_get_property_available filter allows customising date format.
- Tweak: External links function improved.
- Tweak: Added additional plugn file security access to prevent file reading outside of WordPress.
- Fix: Number Formatting function PHP warning fixed.
- Fix: is_epl_post function to prevent error when no posts are activated.
- Tweak: Commercial auction listing support.
- New: Contacts and form system for managing listing leads and history of contact.
- New: contact_capture shortcode // Needs Author id of page and URL.
- New: Contact System for Lead Generation and Capture.
- New: Form API supports editor.
- New: Dashboard Widget Listing and Contact Activity Feed.
- New: Date Picker updated JS for improved usage and improved compatibility with themes and plugins.
- Tweak: Code Docblocks created for http://docs.easypropertylistings.com.au code reference.
- New: Link a contact with a listing and display details and quick access to contact.
- New: Error tracking and debug logging helper functions.
- New: Form API supports sections breaks.
- New: Contextual help tab added to Add/Edit Listin page.
- New: Inspection date format now customisable from settings.
- Tweak: Extension license updater updated.
- Tweak Added additional map CSS classes to improve Google Map output with some themes.
- New: Adjustable Map pin when editing a listing and setting coordinates. Drag the map pin to adust the position.
- Tweak: Imported values of 0 no longer display on commercial listings.
- Tweak: epl_render_html_fields allows for css class set in the field array of meta-boxes.
- Tweak: Commercial authority default type is now For Sale instead of Auction.
- Tweak: Converted Radio options to tick boxes to reduce space.
- Tweak: Commercial auction listing support.
- Tweak: Bedrooms allow studio option.
- Tweak: Applied thousands separator to land sizes using settings.
- Tweak: Allow for .00 and .0 when adding listing prices.
- Tweak: Toilet supports decimal.
- Tweak: Additional Features increased to three columns to minimise space with single checkboxes.
- Tweak: Listing price, sale, and rental price now supports decimal values when saving.
- Tweak: Bond supports decimal figures.
- Tweak: Translation strings fixed.
- Tweak: m2 html character added.
- Tweak: Listings with prices set to 0 like bond no longer display in admin.
- Fix: Rental listing when using price text the rental period no longer displays in admin.
- Tweak: Pagination loading globally for use in admin.
- New: Pagination enhanced to enable adjustment of output.
- Fix: Old function in metaboxes removed as it inadvertently caused additional unnecessary queries.
- New: Generate visual reports on your listing KPI status so you can track your listings and sales.
- Tweak: [listing_search] shortcode using new API and allows for custom templates. Place the template in themes/your_theme/easypropertylistings/templates/ folder.
- Tweak: Enhanced Search Object thanks to codewp allows widget template override.
- New: Search Widget and [listing_search] shortcode allows for property status option.
- New: Search template now editable using epl_get_template_part.
- New: Search widget and [listing_search] shortcode order option added to allow adjusting of field order.
- New: Second agent field allows for searching users.
- New: Search upgraded to object thanks to codewp.
- New: Search for second listing author on listings.
- New: Search widget and [listing_search] shortcode status search option added.
- New: Search widget and [listing_search] shortcode support any registered post types.
- New: Search widget and [listing_search] shortcode support single drop down selection for price, land, building.
- Fix: Session start less likely to cause issues with certain server configurations.
- Fix: listing_open shortcode no longer displays sold or leased listings.
- New: Additional customisation of shortcode-listing.php template part.
- Tweak: Listing Shortcode adjusted for better processing of options
- New: [listing_auction] shortcode
- New: Contact shortcode. [epl_contact_form]
- New: Contact Form Widget.
- New: Sort by location A-Z added to front end listing filter.
- Tweak: iThemes Builder archive-listing.php and single-listing.php templates updated to improve render_content theme function.
- New: Allow extensions to use core templates for output.
- Fix: Added translation string for P.A. label
- Fix: Translation of land size unit.
- Tweak: LinkedIn will use full URL or fallback.
- New: Default embedded video width adjustable from settings.
- New: Video links now support additional formats like Vimeo using the WordPress wp_oembed.
- New: Listing widget now loadable using epl_get_template_part thanks to codewp.
- Tweak: Widget descriptions added to widget management.
- Fix: Stray ul tag with search widget tabbing.
- Tweak: Improved get_additional_features_html function for additional features and added epl_get_additional_features_html filter
- New: Contact tags taxonomy added for creating your own contact tags.
- Tweak: Listing heading function enhanced for other post types.
- New: epl_get_property_feature_taxonomy filter allowing adjustment of listing features.
- New: epl_get_property_auction filter allows adjustment of auction date format.
- New: epl_get_property_auction_label filter to adjust the Auction label.
- New: epl_get_property_price_display Filter
- New: epl_get_property_price_sold_display Filter
- New: epl_get_property_price_sold_date Filter
- New: epl_get_property_rent Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bond Filter
- New: epl_get_property_land_category Filter
- New: epl_commercial_auction_label Filter
- New: epl_get_price_plain_value Filter
- New: epl_get_price Filter
- New: epl_get_price_sticker Filter
- New: epl_get_price_in_list Filter
- New: epl_get_property_commercial_category Filter
- New: epl_get_property_year_built_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_year_built Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bath_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bathrooms_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bath Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bed_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bedrooms_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_bed Filter
- New: epl_get_property_rooms_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_rooms Filter
- New: epl_get_parking_spaces_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_parking Filter
- New: epl_get_property_garage_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_garage Filter
- New: epl_get_property_carport_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_carport Filter
- New: epl_get_property_air_conditioning_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_air_conditioning Filter
- New: epl_get_property_pool_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_pool Filter
- New: epl_get_property_security_system_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_security_system Filter
- New: epl_get_property_land_area_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_land_value Filter
- New: epl_get_property_building_area_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_building_area_value Filter
- New: epl_get_property_new_construction_label Filter
- New: epl_get_property_new_construction Filter
- New: epl_get_property_com_car_spaces_label Filter
- New: Dynamic filter for addiitonal features epl_get_{meta_key}_label
- New: epl_get_additional_features_html Filter
- New: epl_get_additional_rural_features_html Filter
- New: epl_get_additional_commerical_features_html Filter
- New: epl_get_features_from_taxonomy Filter
- New: epl_checkbox_single_check_options Filter
- New: epl_property_sub_title_plus_outgoings_label.
- New: epl_property_sub_title_available_from_label.
- New: epl_get_formatted_property_address filter.
- New: epl_get_property_category filter.
- New: epl_get_property_tax.
- New: epl_property_sub_title_property_features filter for Property Features label.
- New: epl_property_sub_title_plus_outgoings filter for Plus Outgoings label.
- New: epl_property_sub_title_commercial_features filter for Commercial Features label.
- New: epl_property_sub_title_rural_features filter for Rural Features label.
- New: epl_switch_views_sorting_title_sort filter for Sort label.
- New: epl_switch_views_sorting_title_list filter for List label.
- New: epl_switch_views_sorting_title_grid filter for Grid label.
- New: epl_pagination_before_page_numbers filter.
- New: epl_pagination_after_page_numbers filter.
- New: epl_pagination_single_content_text Filter
- New: epl_pagination_single_tag Filter.
- New: epl_pagination_single Filter.
- New: epl_pagination_single_dot_tag Filter
- New: epl_pagination_single_dot_content Filter
- New: epl_pagination_single_dot_attributes Filter
- New: epl_pagination_single_dot Filter
