Using Fabrik for a Real Estate Site

[lownotes]

Hi There,

I've used Fabrik for a couple of small things, but now I'm needing to build a lightweight Real Estate site. Can someone tell me if the following would be possible with Fabrik? I'm also looking at jxtended catalog or Joom suit content. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

• Build a database of real estate listings that an office admin could use to add new listings
• drop downs and check boxes of features of properties
• image uploads, thumnail creation and/or
• upload folder of scaled images that a mambot could turn into a gallery (I have the mambot, just automate the upload of a folder of images and take folder name and place into mambot code)
• create simple user search interface
• create detail listing report template.
• draw google map based upon address field
• place modules, like latest news, that show links to different queries of the listings. ie: Latest Office Space Listings, or Featured Listings (an arbitrary group of properties)
• is it possible to include catelog database into more than one joomla site? ie: two RE websites sharing same listing database

 

[cheesegrits]

Build a database of real estate listings that an office admin could use to add new listings

Yes.

drop downs and check boxes of features of properties

Yes.

image uploads, thumnail creation and/or

Yes. Fabrik does image uploading with thumbnail handling, with the option to use either Slimbox or HighSlide for popups. The thumbnails can optionally be shown in table view.

upload folder of scaled images that a mambot could turn into a gallery (I have the mambot, just automate the upload of a folder of images and take folder name and place into mambot code)

Yes. We store images in the file system, and you can specify a separate upload directory for each upload element, and optionally a different thumbnail directory, and/or filename prefix.

create simple user search interface

Yes. You can either use the built in table search filters, or build your own search form.

create detail listing report template.

Yes.

draw google map based upon address field

Yes. Although it does require some custom code, but I have a working examole I built for someone else.

(Fabrik 2.0 has a maps plugin, but 2.0 is still in early Beta, you wouldn't want to use it on a live site)

place modules, like latest news, that show links to different queries of the listings. ie: Latest Office Space Listings, or Featured Listings (an arbitrary group of properties)

Yes. Although having said that, I'm not sure if we can apply filters via the Fabrik module. I'll have to check on that for ya.

is it possible to include catelog database into more than one joomla site? ie: two RE websites sharing same listing database

I think so. You can specify as many database connections as you want, and associate tables with those connections. So I don't see any reason we couldn't have two instances of the same Fabrik app access the same backend db server. I've just not tried it personally.

-- hugh

 

[Tigratrus]

I've got a little experience with JXtended catalog and Joomsuite Content.

Jx Catalog would be my next pick after Fabrik, but it's a pretty distant second. From what I've gathered swapping emails with the author (granted he's probably got one of the best handles on J! internals of anyone in the world, for obvious reasons so the future of Catalog seems pretty bright assuming he has time and it isn't replaced by something else), Catalog is pretty straightforward and lacks the tremendous flexibility that Fabrik brings to thew table. If you're looking to do basically what Catalog does without extending it much, it probably does ity very well and extremely efficently.

Joomsuite Content is quite different, it's more of an article system on steroids than a form/data application system. The biggest drawback that I can see with JS Content for what you want to do is the inability to export/import data. It's also a bit buggy, and doesn't play nice with some other apps. I found that I cannot run MyBlog with JS Content on our server as it generates a fatal error when you try to access the blog on the front end. It somehow screws up the router so SEF urls go awry. JS Content also lacks the ability to stylize the output in any meaningful way.

That said, it's a pretty dang spiffy replacement for com_content, and fundamentally superior in a number of ways (unlimited levels of hierarchy instead of being limited to just Sec/Cat, excellent integration with JS's member and securty/subscription systems etc... Should you decide that you want to buy a JS Content license, I've got one I could sell to you (assuming they allow that) for a pretty good discount. It's nice, but we just plain don't need it.

Having looked seriously at all three, Fabrik was hands down the best choice for what we wanted to do, the ability to connect to other databases and tables and easily do data import/export is cruicial. As is the extremely flexible nature of the tool itself, and it's very VERY bright future.

And... Well... The support for Fabrik just plain rocks. .

James and Susan