The Star Home: A Drupal Real Estate website without nodes

The Star Home is a Spanish Real Estate company that handles property sales and holiday rentals. When they asked Sentosa Software to build a multilingual website for them, Drupal was our platform of choice. But there was one challenge to overcome: The Star Home uses an online real estate management software system, Advantez, to run their business. The property descriptions and photos would be stored in, and managed by, the Advantez system, therefore the new website would be based on external data that we would have to retrieve from Advantez via SOAP web services.

We looked at two possible solutions: We could import the data into Drupal nodes every night, and build a traditional node-based website; or we could pull the data from Advantez "on the fly" and not use nodes at all. After some investigation, and reading various forum discussions about using Drupal with external data, we opted for a node-less solution. Our data would be as fresh as possible, and we could still take advantage of the other great Drupal features like blocks, the Form API, AHAH, locale, user management, caching, session handling, etc. And of course we could use nodes, CCK, Views and many other great contributed modules for the parts of the website not directly related to properties and property searches.

Building the site

The website theme is a minimalist pink and grey on a white background, so the Zen theme was the perfect starting point. We very quickly put together the 2/3 column layout that is used throughout the site. The core multilingual capabilities of Drupal, together with the Internationalization module allowed us to build the menu structure and content in four languages, English, Spanish, French and German.

The core functionality of the website resides in a custom module we wrote to interface to the external data. The menu system allows us to use wildcards in menu paths so we can build keyword-rich search engine friendly URLs to property pages. The menu callbacks use the PHP SoapClient class to access the web services that allow us to retrieve property details, search the property database, and feed contacts and rental bookings back into Advantez.

The property search form was a major challenge. The AHAH Helper module lived up to its name and was an enormous help in building a dynamic form, and saved us many hours. There is still work to be done here to improve performance, and we plan to use the cache api to store locally the data that's used to populate the drop-down lists and the Flash map.

Modules used

Among the contributed modules we used to build the site are the following:

• AHAH Helper for dynamic forms.
• CCK, ImageField and Imagefield Crop to create the images shown on the home page slide show. Imagefield Crop provides a widget for cropping an image to a predefined size on file upload, and is a great way to ensure that the web site owner can change the slideshow images easily and safely.
• Views, Views Slideshow and DraggableViews to create and manage the home page slide show.
• Nice Menus for the nice right-expanding The Star Home menu in the left sidebar.
• Internationalization for translating strings, menus, blocks and nodes.
• Nodewords for adding meta tags.
• Pathauto for automatic SEO friendly URLs.
• Google Analytics to add the Analytics tracking code.

We also used a number of 3rd party jQuery scripts, including droppy for the drop-down language switcher, the jQuery UI Datepicker for the holiday rentals booking calendar, labelify for form labels inside textboxes, and MarkerClusterer for handling large numbers of Google Maps markers.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Drupal team, the module contributers, the jQuery gurus, and all the people who have answered our questions on the Drupal forums. Thank you all!