Use of Gantry with WPProperty plugin
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- Michelle Myers
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I realize that it I should not expect help with this, but am hoping that someone may be familiar enough with the plugin to assist me with this. The plugin is great and works quite well with TwentyTen or Twenty Eleven themes, but am having trouble with the property page layout in my Gantry theme (Panacea). I am sure it is related to Gantry though and not the specific theme.
The plugin creates Property pages, which are not pages or posts, but completely separate, so creating a custom layout was of no help and since I am doing bulk uploads I wouldn't want to have to go in and manually change anything.
If anyone would like to make money building websites for Realtors, figuring this out would be a huge benefit, so I am hoping someone may find it worthwhile to investigate.
The plugin is from usabilitydynamics.com. It is free, but i am using the XML importer (paid premium add-on) to pull listing data. I have that working which was a great triumph! This is something that really is going to vastly improve SEO for my client, so I want to stick with it. However their support has been terrible, their forum is horrific and documentation pitiful. I have exhausted myself dealing with them. They only support their theme, the Denali, which is another $200 or the TwentyTen and TwentyEleven themes.
Again, I really think it would be worthwhile to get this working to anyone who wants to build websites for real estate!
I would be happy to put together a list of what I have tried, but I really think it would be best for someone to install the free plugin and see how it works first. Someone with more knowledge of php, I'm sure would probably not even try what I did!
I'm pretty much a hacker, but I do like to try and occassionally I do figure things out on my own. 
To anyone willing to accept the challenge, you will have my eternal gratitude. I am a single mom with three kids, no other income in the household, so I cannot afford to pay a programmer to help me with this. I've got to get this project wrapped up. I am already waaaaaaay past the point of ridiculous in the amount of time I have spent on this. - Wannabe geek chick trying to self-educate.
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- Cliff Pfeifer
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Hi, what problems are you having exactly? Since it's a paid plugin, I can't download it to see what is happening. Let me know what the issue is and I may be able to help. We do know that Gantry isn't compatible with every third party plugin, but sometimes there is an easy fix - other times there is nothing that can be done, to be completely honest. I have to see what's happening to know for sure.
- The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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- Michelle Myers
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 48
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Hi Cliff! Thanks so much for replying. Actually the plugin is free. I did pay for the importer, but you wouldn't need to use that to see the issue. They also charge for their template, but again, I bought yours because their support is terrible. I am praying that you can help! Murphy's Law seems to have taken over this project!
The plugin actually creates "property" displays, which work like pages, but are not pages. Also there are widgets that can be assigned to the property types. There are default types, but you can also create them and a new widget position will appear specifically for that property type allowing you to add an image gallery to that position. When using TwentyTen or TwentyEleven, these images will appear along the right side bar position of the property display "page" (again, not a page like other Wordpress pages). When viewing the same "page" with a Gantry theme, the widget appears at the very bottom, which looks awful.
I'm sure it is because of the property.php file that creates the layout is not actually going through Gantry. I'm hoping that file can be edited to work. I did find something on the usability dynamics site that suggested placing this file in the theme folder, which I did. I also tried creating a custom layout, but that didn't work either even when pasting the contents of this php file in the mainbody div. I'm thinking that maybe the property.php file just needs some added code... But then again... I have only a little understanding of how gantry works. This is my first time using a gantry theme.
I can send you a screenshot if you like or even pm the site and credentials if you want to take a look there...
- Wannabe geek chick trying to self-educate.
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- Cliff Pfeifer
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- Hi, PM me your link, Wordpress Login and FTP information and I'll take a look.
- The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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- Cliff Pfeifer
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- Posts: 8444
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- Hi, I got your info. I need to see what is happening, I don't see where you are using this on the front end of the site. Can you set up a page where the problems are visible? Keep in mind, I have absolutely no idea how to work this property plugin. I do have an idea or two about how to fix it, I just need to have something to work with so I can try a few things. Thanks.
- The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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- Michelle Myers
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 48
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Thanks, Cliff. The plugin works from the back end, but displays information on the front. Here is an example of a property display. It's probably important to remember this is not a page or a post, but a "property" accessed on the back end through the plugin and displayed on the front end via a search.
bloomingtonindianahomesales.com/property/8309-south-ashley-ave/
I hope this helps. Again, what I should see is the thumbnail photos along the right side. The plugin automatically creates a side bar widget position for the property type and the gallery widget is placed in that position. If you switch the theme to TwentyEleven and refresh the url above you will see the way it should display.
I am relieved that you may have an idea of how to fix it! This is fantastic news! - Wannabe geek chick trying to self-educate.
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- Cliff Pfeifer
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Hi Michelle, thanks for the info, I see what's happening now, basically it's a custom post type. Wasn't sure, every plugin has a different way of calling things in, often times that dictates what needs to be done.
Thankfully, this isn't a huge deal. What is happening is the Property plugin is using a standard WP HTML and theme structure, which will work fine with the default themes. Gantry does not use the same method, all of our divs have different ID names, we don't use the "template parts" system, with separate files for sidebars and widget areas ECT, it's all handled through the backend and the single index.php file in the theme directory. Basically, these guys wrote the plugin to work in the default Wordpress themes, any other theme that doesn't use the same structure will have issues.
In this case, you can fix things up with CSS alone, it's the just styling that's missing, the files are loading and working as they should. Basically, I added three lines of CSS to your style.css file in the theme directory and it gets things pretty close. Take a look and see if that works, we can definitely tweak the CSS more, that's fairly simple to do.
This fix may not do the trick on all the various types of page layouts the plugin offers, but adding additional CSS is way easier than re-programming, and that's good news Hope that helps.
- The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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- Michelle Myers
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 48
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I am so relieved! Yes, we are close. This is fantastic news for me! Now that I know what needs to be done, I can play around with it to get it just as I want it now I think. I actually have Dreamweaver, but have not used it much at all. I have set up a local XAMPP server with a Wordpress and WPProperty install, but am not very comfortable with Dreamweaver yet. If you know of any good video tutorials that would specifically help me with this, that would be awesome and I would not likely need any more help from you. I have a lynda.com subscription, but there is almost too much there. I don't want to watch 100 hours of video. Or just a text tutorial would honestly be fine for me. I can still follow written directions fairly well. That is how I learned to install Wordpress, Joomla, SugarCRM and the XAMPP local server.
The support you guys offer here in the forum is so amazing!!! I hope this helps someone else facing this same issue later. The plugin really is great, but their support is AWFUL! Glad I didn't waste $200 on their Denali theme! Sad thing is, if their support had been better, I would have considered it. I will NEVER use another template club. You guys are the bomb!!! - Wannabe geek chick trying to self-educate.
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- Cliff Pfeifer
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Thanks: 20
- Website Developer
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Hi, cool. I was thinking this would be a lot more complex than it was, it usually is with these types of things. Basically, CSS is what we're dealing with, it takes a while to learn the ins and outs as it's a code language. When I first started doing websites, it was the first thing I got into, and it's knowledge that will apply to any website or CMS, everything uses CSS - it's a good thing to learn if you work on a lot of websites. It's by far the easiest to learn in my opinion.
There are a ton of resources on the web that you can check out. I wrote this article for the RT magazine a while ago, some of it could apply to what you need to do: www.rockettheme.com/magazine/1406-basic-...tion-and-positioning
If you need help making adjustments like this, just post here and I'll look at it. Usually minor CSS adjustments will be all that is necessary. - The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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