Real estate site

wisdom,

I don't think there is anything really special. All modules are pretty much doing what they supposed to do - I haven't re-invented any wheels here (which is kinda great to know that things can work out of the box :)lol)

I used very little imagination to pull 4 random images in the header from the property listings. All four images are from the same, randomly chosen, listing - I used custom region to place them and some PHP code to do the query from the block.

Also, I used taxonomy to categorize my content internally for the purpose of showing specific blocks in the middle column for the internal pages. For example if you navigate to Phoenix Area Information page - you will notice that middle column has it's own additional navigation. Many other pages will show their own additional content (wherethere's sub-navigation or other things) depending on the category they belong to. In order to implement that I used PHP snippets for block visibility based on taxonomy.

I used panels for the home page as you can see... nothing exciting here beside that it works :)

..umm, what else...

Oh, I know - webforms rock! Even though we're generating leads for the purpose of getting clients - webforms give you this nice analysis option that shows you how many people filled out specific fields. Based on this you can estimate witch things are people are more interested in. Also, it gives very clear understanding of which fields can be eliminated. Also, you can test by changing field labels and moving them around to see if usability of the form/fields improve. I think it's one coolest modules after CCK.

I'm using caching which dramatically improves loading speed and sever resource economy. It affects my random blocks a little, but it still woks out nicely.

I think that's it.

as for the map - sorry guys, I have to clear that up. I wrote custom JS to read XML data from external files to output city boundaries and the blurbs with the links in them - this is not something that implemented within Drupal modules. I basically have JS and XML files externally; I created a separate page-*.tpl.php file to included that JS and that's it. I messed with GoogleMaps module for a little wile, but it doesn't have all the options working yet, and since I already had a working maps search page on my old site - I just re-implemented it with Drupal.

Also, the property search section (http://search.phoenixhomes.com) is a third party tool that is even not hosted on our server, but they implemented my theme.

mikewire,

the property search solution is a third party application hosted on their server. We just applied our theme. I think I mentioned that somewhere above.

Thanks for the compliments! The "New Properties Alert" is just a form - it does not automatically subscribe people to MLS updates - agents or their assistants do that manually through the official MLS (not the IDX we're using). As I mentioned before, our IDX is not integrated into Drupal - it is a third party solution that I dressed into my custom theme. But the solution by itself has property alerts built in as well... we're providing additional forms which serve similar purpose as well as providing more detailed leads to us. This is a basic site with "endless possibilities" that Drupal provides :)

No I haven't had a chance to publish any more details on the development of that site. Since then, I have developed a few more projects and I don't even remember the particular details of the www.phoenixhomes.com development :)lol

I think with the real estate stuff I developed everything (mostly) using CCK and the Views. As I mentioned before - the IDX/MLS Search is a third party solution that is using our HTML template and CSS - we didn't implement that in Drupal due to the current brokerage restrictions in that particular corporation.