How-To Create a Real Estate Search Page in WordPress
Posted on 26. Jan, 2009 by Joshua Ferris in Blog, Customizing WordPress, Featured, WordPress
Nearly all real estate search pages are merely pages on an agent or broker’s site that frames in a search page from a third party real estate search vendor.
When you decide to add a real estate search to your website you are going to need to iframe the page into your page by doing the following:
1. Locate your single.php file within the active theme’s folder.
2. Open the single.php file with a text editor like TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows). Alternatively, you could use a more powerful HTML editior like Dreamweaver (Windows/Mac) or Coda (Mac) but those programs are really overkill when it comes to simply adding a line of code to your page.
3. At the top of the code you are going to need to create a template name for the page so that when you create your real estate search from the WordPress backend it will have your pre-made template available to choose (I’ll explain more about this in a minute.)
Here’s how you add a template name to your page:
Paste the following code at the top of the file:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Real Estate Search Page
*/
?>
This php code will make your page appear as a template file so that you can use the template (with your real estate search embedded) on your website.
4. Now you need to add your real estate search link to the template by inserting the iframe code between your header and footer code.
The code you need to place is below:
<p><iframe src="http://idxlink.com" width="100%" height="2000px" scrolling="yes" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
Note: If you use Diverse Solutions or other IDX providers that provide their IDX solution through a script then you wouldn’t need to iframe the search into your page because the script will take care of all that. What you do in this scenario is follow the instructions above but replace the code with the script link from your provider.
5. Save your page and go into your WordPress dashboard.
6. Go to Pages -> Add New.
7. Type the name of the title you want for your real estate search page. I titled mine “Real Estate Search”.
8. On the right side, in the “Attributes” menu, go to the Template section.
9. Click on the Template drop down and select “Real Estate Search Page” from your options.
10. Publish your page. You have now integrated real estate search into your website! Congrats!
Questions, comments or suggestions? Leave a comment below!