Single Property Site – Sidebar Widget

I like having three column layouts for single property sites.   I’ll go into the why in the theme’s post.  

I also  like to have a couple of text boxes so the first thing you will want to do after activating this plugin is to add at least an additional text box and save.   You do this at the bottom of the setup screen

The layout of the sidebars is as follows.

• Text1
  This is where I put the brokerage and contact information
• Text2
  You can see above is the Summary Description of the property
• Links
  This is where the categories and links to them show up
  • Documents
  • Information
  • Websites
• Pages (I change this title to Detailed Information)
• Recent Posts (I change the  title to Additional Information)
  This requires editing the sidebar widget file finding the word  Recent Posts and changing it to read “Additional Information”

function widget_recent_entries($args) {
extract($args);
$title = __('Additional Information', 'widgets');
$r = new WP_Query('showposts=10');
if ($r->have_posts()) :
?>

This isn’t as hard as it may sound, you can copy all the text to notepad search for “Recent Posts” replace it with “Additional Information” copy all the text back to the plugin editor and save.

Or you can do it the way I do.   Look at the code line for line till you find Recent Posts and replace it.

However, I only did this once.   After that I saved this altered copy of the widget plugin for the single property listing blogs.

If you want to see how this works here is our example blog from the beginning.

Macenroe Single Property Site

There are a lot of, I’ll call them “sub-widgets” you can add to a blog if you have the sidebar widget installed on a blog.   I keep it to the ones mentioned above.  

The Sidebars are to:

1. make navigation of the site easy
2. provide quick summary details of the property
3. allow visitors to grasp a lot of information in a couple of quick glances

The Sidebar isn’t to steal the show.   Keep it simple.