The sidebar widget is a wonderful thing. It makes it so easy to change the layout of your sidebars and add additional widgets without having to write a single line of code.
I wrote about the Sidebar Widget on single property sites. Included in with the sidebar widget is the del.icio.us plugin.
I use this little plugin on all the blogs I author. It is very handy. But I don’t think many other people use it or even give it a thought.
I was reading a thread over at Real Estate Webmasters on social bookmarking. One of those replying stated they never used del.icio.us.
I use it as a repository for all the sites I want to bookmark and comeback to later. I also use it in conjunction with the plugin.
- set up a delicious account
- add it to your browser toolbar
- activate the del.icio.us plugin
- enter a tag for the plugin
- enter a title for the plugin
When you tag something in delicious with that tag it will automatically show up in your sidebar as soon as you tag it.
I know that might not make sense so here is an example of how I use it.
I have the del.icio.us plugin set up on the Tucson Real Estate in the News blog to tucson-real-estate-news. If I read an article in the paper about Tucson real estate I go to that article on the paper’s web site and I tag it with the tucson-real-estate-news tag.
The link and title immediately show up on the blog. If the title is longer than I want I can go into my del.icio.us account and edit the title.
The Oro Valley Real Estate blog has it’s own tag of oro-valley-news. You saw that one coming.
I also have it on this blog. It is down at the bottom of the right hand navigation titled “Items of Interest”
It is a handy little plugin. I’m sure many of you can come up with a way to use this plugin on your blog. It is a quick and easy way to share a list of links where you want your readers to go.
As an aside, the paper makes these article free to search for a couple of weeks, but after that you have to pay per article to get them out of the archive, but if you have the link already, it always works. This is another advantage to this little plugin and del.icio.us.
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:
- make navigation of the site easy
- provide quick summary details of the property
- 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.
My Hosting Choice:
Custom WP Site Design
Follow On Twitter
Recent News
-
Featured News
-
Email & RSS Feed
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.Yeah Right !
