Hi there,

About the project
I don't do this very often, but I'm pretty proud of this one. I'm a partner in a brand agency in Sydney Australia and we recently undertook the rebrand of a real estate business that felt they'd outgrown their previous look and feel. We've now launched and are in the final stages of roll out.

About the site
It's a custom-built integration with MyDesktop, which is the main property portal feed in Australia. Agencies upload their properties and have them pushed out to all the major portals and to their own site.

We made heavy use of template overrides and extra fields. There's a lot of logic being driven by extraFields that decides what should be shown on any given property. It uses tags to show which agents (if any) are assigned to properties. ExtraFields also drive the customised Google Maps instance. There's also custom modules for auctions, open for inspections and other elements.

We also used the excellent UALayout plugin in combination with standard Bootstrap responsive techniques in overrides to determine what should be shown for mobiles, tablets and desktop.

Livesite: www.grea.com.au

I love it Kelsey!

Well done, you should feel proud about this project.

Well done @KelseyBrookes

What's your Twitter handle?

Thanks Krikor, Joe, much appreciated :)

Joe, we don't use Twitter much at the moment as we're pretty slammed, but when we do you can find us at @lovelockload

We'll have this up on our showcase at lovedlockedloaded.com/ soon. Not every site we design gets deployed by us, but every site we develop uses K2.

Wow that is great job, superbly executed. I would love to learn a little more about your custom integration with myDesktop, I am a partner in small brand, media agency in Geelong, having that sort of integration with the real estate portals could open up a world of opportunities.

Thanks Chris!

It was a fairly huge undertaking and we've found that MyDesktop is still using its decades-old underpinnings to drive the entire site. It can be hard to explain to the client that saved changes might not appear for hours. We had an instance of a change saved at 11am not showing in three successive XML updates to that property and didn't appear until about 4pm. No idea why.

The reality is that there are existing real estate plugins for Joomla which are excellent and either have, or can have, MyDesktop integration done for a fraction of the cost of what we deployed. We feel the end result was worth it however.

But this was a branding project first and foremost and we wanted to create a living magazine page and specifically didn't want the accoutrements that come along with a typical real estate portal. That said, we're confident it will drive sales and marketing nicely.

To answer your question, we built a suite of plugins for Joomla which map to the XML feed from MyDesktop that's pushed to the server. Those plugins keep K2 in sync with the feed.

I often feature Joomla! websites via Twitter - guess what site I featured today :)

Invalid consumer key/secret in configuration

Cheers @KelseyBrookes

Thanks Joe - really appreciate the shout out. We've typically been pretty bad at self promotion, mainly because we've operated solely on word of mouth for the last 15 years.

We're aiming to change that.

As a sidenote, this site is the last that we'll be using Joostrap for. While it's fairly style-agnostic, it's still opinionated about some styles & effects.

As of the project we're in now, we're using the blank bootstrap template, which allows us to roll-our-own bootstrap to just utilise the features we need without imposing anything but the most basic bootstrap styles. It also includes the original less bootstrap files and so we can edit and recompile rather than override.

Hey Kelsey,

Is this your post:
bnrjoomla.com/forums/posts/f2/t16/k2-bnr-nonfunctional-since-update-to-k2-2-7.html

If so, did you ever resolve the issue? Did the developer contact you?

Thanks,

Joe

That's a no on both counts Joe.

There's also K2 Split Content, which has also been abandoned.

They're incredibly useful modules and I've been thinking about putting my external dev on the path of both updating and extending the functionality of whichever module has the most permissive license.

Hi Kelsey,

Check out this awesome resource (thanks to @Krikor)
www.joomlaworks.net/forum/k2-en/46586-custom-k2-content-module-assistance#157655

Also, here's a tool to help split K2 items:
www.cmext.vn/products/cmk2stepbystep

Take Care,

Joe Campbell

Looks interesting, thanks Joe!

I'll probably still have look at extending the concept tho. I'd like to have it work on category views (display category image, title, intro text, etc) but I also have this concept of 'named subcategory templates' - that you have consistently named subcategories that are the same for multiple categories. The module is then told to pull content from any category named 'x' that is a subcategory of the current item's category.

Abstract, I know, but super useful for building sites with complex content-rich overrides.

Sounds interesting, you could leverage Regular Labs Articles Anywhere to do something like this...

It's a bit broader than that - but thank you, because I can definitely see how that would reduce some of the overhead.

For example, this is a site I built a while ago for a professional speaker management company, the example being a profile page for a speaker:

odemanagement.com/speakers/michael-mcqueen.html

Each speaker has their own category with their own name and a single article for their profile (with a bunch of extra fields for twitter, main video, PDF downloads and other widgets).

Each speaker category has subcategories for testimonials, topics and products (discover me), which get pulled into the page.

We use tagging extensively throughout the site, so couldn't use it here without it conflicting.

So I have a pattern of

Speaker Name (category)
|
–– Testimonials
–– Topics
–– Products

All the client has to do to is to create articles that are saved to the category (and make use of extra fields) and the profile pages are easily kept up to date with new content.

It's a technique I use a lot throughout my sites, but it necessitates creeping moduleitis, but with a split-content module that could target specifically-named subcategories it could be reduced to just one.

Impressive Kelsey.

A little jFeedback:

- missing Favicon and other meta icons
- missing brand in meta title (odemanagement.com/about/about-us.html)

Impressive Kelsey :)
Once again Kudos buddy!