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