It has been a busy week at Placester with regards to fixing issues. The following changes were made to the Hosted Network (sites hosted on placester.net). These changes will be deployed to the WordPress.org site in the coming weeks. If you are a partner and self-hosting the premium themes, contact the partner team to get an updated set of themes.
Placester Plugin
Agent ID Filter Fixed – (WP-81) – Most of the MLS feeds offered by Placester have all listings on the MLS. Some agents only want to see their own listings or set some other type of criteria. This can be achieved with Global Property Filters. When you used a Global Property Filter on an Agent ID however, all listings were removed. Obviously this is not the correct behavior and this has been fixed.
Support Chat Removed From Admin – (WP-320) – We offer pre-sales chat on the front page of the Placester.com website. This is intended for pre-sales questions and not necessarily for tech support. Unfortunately that chat window was also shown in the Admin section of the WordPress site. That opened us up for some confusing conversations, so this has been removed. For support, please call us or send an email to support@placester.com.
In a Search Listings Shortcode, Sort By options work – (WP-325) – When you create a Search Listings shortcode, there are a couple default Sort By options including by Price. You can also choose most of the other fields available in your MLS feed. Unfortunately no matter what you chose, only the default options showed on the front end. Now what you choose is what you get.
Creating a global filter on uncur_data>area is allowed – (WP-345) – Some MLS feeds offer a field called Area which is a superset of a neighborhood but a subset of city. For now, this field is only shown in the group uncur_data. When you try to add a global filter on a field like Area, you would get an error: That Filter Is Already Active. It wasn’t active so that’s a problem. It has been resolved.
Fremont, Plymouth, Sedona, and other themes
Feedburner issues resolved – (WP-278, WP-319) – In Fremont, there is an option to have the Sign Up Now star link to the Feedburner feed. Other themes have similar options. Unfortunately the process to enter that feed URL was…ummm, sketchy. Doh! This was obviously an issue which we have now resolved. Although it was noticed in Fremont, we fixed it in all the current themes as well.
Recent Blog Posts widget now shows blogs – (WP-341) – Widgets are a great way to add interesting functionality to the sidebars on our themes. One of the widgets is designed to show Recent Blog Posts. Unfortunately instead of showing blog posts, it showed listings. This is an easy mistake to make since both listings and blog posts are similar types of entities according to WordPress. That said, this issue has been resolved.
Franklin Theme
Custom Drawn Areas work for City/State/Zip – (WP-216) – Sometimes the data you have doesn’t have enough detail for your customers. You can overcome this by defining new areas and then assigning them to existing neighborhoods, cities, states, and zip codes. The definition part of this process works great, and if you assign that definition to a neighborhood, the process continues to function as expected. But if you assign it to a city or state or zip code, then the resulting map didn’t display in a way that made sense. This has now been resolved.
Neighborhoods page and corresponding search results are equivalent – (WP-269) – If you search for a neighborhood, the listings that come up should be the same as the listings shown on a neighborhood page. Unfortunately the neighborhood page on Franklin wasn’t showing any listings. It turned out to be related to case sensitivity and how we searched for listings. This issue has been resolved.
Selecting multiple property type global filters now works – (WP-335) – Global Filters are designed to be inclusive, so if I choose a global filter of Boston for the city, I will only see properties in Boston. Some global filters (not all) are able to be used in combinations. So I could say show me properties in Boston and Cambridge. This is also supposed to work for property types, but we had an issue where Condos weren’t appearing. This issue has been fixed.
Fremont Theme
Recent Blog Posts widget now pulls featured images – (WP-235) – Somewhat related to WP-341 above, the widget would also not show featured images on Fremont. This problem has been resolved.
Map defaults to your part of the world – (WP-279) – Placester is based in Boston, MA (actually right now we are in Cambridge across the street from MIT). As a result it seemed like a good idea to center maps to Boston then relocate to where ever the property is located being viewed. Now in Search under Theme Options, there is a setting to change the default location to where ever you are.
Phoenix Theme
When the logo is dropped on mobile text is shown in its place – (WP-303) – Some users prefer to have a logo shown instead of a textual representation of their brokerage name. So we have an option to turn text off. But when we go to mobile, the logo image doesn’t work well so we don’t display it. This means the visitor to that page will get no title for the site when viewed from their phone. We fixed that so if no logo is showing, the visitor will always see the text version of the title.
Unit Number is shown in property info – (WP-310) – On some sites we started noticing that unit numbers were missing from the address. This issue has been addressed. 😉
Plymouth Theme
Slideshow on mobile cuts off important image details – (WP-281) – The Plymouth theme uses a slideshow at the top of the home page. When you resize the browser or view it on a mobile device, the aspect ratio of the image changes and part of the image is cut off. The user was expecting images to resize to different ratios depending on display size but always show the main subject of the image. The problem is that we have no method to analyze the image and figure out where the subject is so we really need to expect the subject to be in the middle. When you add an image to a slideshow, make sure there is enough space on the edges to allow for up to 10-20% to be cut off by changes in aspect ratio.
Sedona Theme
Slideshow appears on all browsers – (WP-74) – The slideshows we use in our themes are pretty great and very popular. But when viewing the Sedona slideshow on Firefox, nothing showed up. It turns out that Firefox doesn’t like how other browsers handle the overflow attribute in CSS. We have modified this to work more consistently across all browsers.
Changing the Sedona sales search title now works – (WP-330) – In Theme Options for most of our themes, there is an option to change the Sales Search title. But Sedona wasn’t respecting any changes made here. We have fixed this error.
