By unfalln on

Hi guys,

I'm a new convert to Drupal and have recently been re-developing a few of my client's sites with the system. I've got an ubercart site ported from oscommerce now and it is running nicely, just waiting for management to go ahead to production. Given most of the other sites are based somewhere near real estate I've decided to dive into the world of module development and have a go at designing a real estate listing service.

My plan is to develop a site exclusively for 7.x (as I'm sure none of my development will be ready until after 7.x gets released anyway) and I hope to build it with less of a focus on just property listings and more on such things as:

* Event calendar for listing auctions, open homes, (user-submitted, agent-moderated) local garage sales, community events and so forth,
* Suburb/Region landing pages with discussion forums and perhaps top-10 suburb rating system,
* Lots of customisation of property features (perhaps leveraging the taxonomy module) for more intuitive searching and the ability to create seo landing and discussion pages for such things as "3 bedrooms" and "inground pool",
* The ability for users to define their own "caravan" by using google maps to plot a course to the properties for sale.
* Automated synchronisation with mass listing sites like realestate.com.au and base.google.com.

I know it's a fairly big undertaking to start a new module from scratch, let alone something as complicated as this, but the best module I've found for real estate in drupal was last updated for 5.x and quite a while ago, and doesn't really suit my purposes. I also believe there are quite a few other modules that can assist me in this (forums, google maps, taxonomy, event calendars, etc) so I can't be all on my own. Lastly I'd really like to be able to get in and tinker as module dev looks really flexible and powerful in drupal.

So onto the questions:

Is Drupal 7.x the best place to start for new module development?
Any tips on other modules that I can plug-in with this to help get me started?
Anyone else working on a real estate module to which I could instead contribute?

Anyway, thanks for listening!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

gauravkhambhala’s picture

gauravkhambhala commented

Hi buddy,

Your project description looks good. I have not been through the 7.x release or changes. But willing to dive into what you have said.

unfalln’s picture

unfalln commented

OMG a reply!

Here I was beginning to think I should just give up on the forums/contributing/etc and do my own thing.
I'm currently just trying to conform, wiped my VS2008 machine (yes, have backed up!) and wrangling with the whole ubuntu/eclipse/cvs installation thing. A lot to take in for a windows dev! Especially outside work hours!

...but should and running with head debugging sometime this weekend and will form some ideas about the actual implementation of this whole task.

Chris Gillis’s picture

Chris Gillis commented

Hey unfalln,

I'm interested in how you went with this module. Especially your automated synchronisation with realestate.com.au. If that is something you finished, would you be willing to share it?

Cheers,
Chris