Wordpress for a realty office site?

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1

Hi,

I want to create a website for a Real Estate office that allows agents to update their own listings and have a super admin to admin the site. I wanted to use wordpress since I’ve seen a few themes out there that seem to accomplish this. I haven’t tried any of them yet though.

Has anyone has any experience in using wordpress for this type of website? or have any other ideas?

Thanks,

2

Problem with WordPress is that it’s still basically for blogs, though it is expanding out of that. If it were me, I’d use a proper website CMS like ExpressionEngine. If there’s a theme you like (for WP or anything else) it’s easy to build it into EE—probably easier than building it into WP!

3

cool. I haven’t heard of EE before, I’ll look into it. Have you used it yourself personally? I also want to be able for the agents to have a simple email client in the website, is that possible with EE? or do you know of a plugin that will offer that feature?

Thanks,

4

Oooh yeah, I’m a big fan. It’s easy to use but hugely powerful. It does cost money though, but worth the money. And a company like this should be able to afford the $300. (There are free alternatives, like MODx, Joomla! and Drupal, but they aren’t as nice to use.)

I also want to be able for the agents to have a simple email client in the website, is that possible with EE? or do you know of a plugin that will offer that feature?

That comes built in to EE, although I’d be more inclined to use a service like CampaignMonitor or MailChimp, as they are cheap but give you lots of great stats, autoresponders etc. I’ve recently set up a site where the clients type in their email content to a template and it feeds directly to CampaignMonitor, so it’s very easy.

EDIT: I may be misreading “email client”. I assume you mean a means for sending out emails, rather than a program like Outlook or Gmail.

5

actually, I did mean something like gmail…ha…
Like a simple client to check an imap account.

6

So what’s wrong with Gmail &co?

7

nothing, but I wanted a unified UI and login for the website. The agent can log into the website to manage their listings and check their company email at the same time.

8

Wordpress is not only for blogs, it has increadible solution for all kinds of websites. It has easy to use Framework which you will like it.

9

True, wordpress isn’t ONLY for blogs, but because that’s how it was started, mangling it to do a whole lot more than that can be more headache than just using something that does lots of stuff from the get-go like Drupal etc.

Ellen Pronk gave a talk on using EE at one of the Fronteers meetings. She really loved it and the company she worked for used it for everything. This was back right before the version-2 was released, so there was a lot of buzz about it at the time anyway.

Wasn’t something I’d use, not because it’s bad but because I avoid CMSes. BUT, if clients need to deal with content, you need a CMS.

10

thanks for the replies everybody.

on a side note, WP3.x has gotten custom post types capability now. Does that change things? or are other CMSs better suited when the focus is more on CMS and less on blogging?

thanks,

11

This recent article compares EE and WP, and it accounts for WP3, too:
http://wpcandy.com/thinks/about-the-wp-vs-ee-pdf