CMS Made Simple Forums

Hey,

If you could have a read though this and let me know if it is at all possible i'd really appreciate the help!


To cut it short a client of ours wants us to redevelop their website which was originally created using this CMS, and which is completely new to me (i prefer Joomla). Basically they are a real estate company who advertise and sell property online. They want to retrieve information from various other sites (auctioneers/real estate) which display property listings  and incorporate the results of a search into their own site - kind of like a one stop shop for finding property.

For instance when a user searches for a particular property using their search form provided, information will be gathered from other sites with property listings based on the search parameters and displayed then to the user on our client's site.  We have a programmer working on some scripts and other means of achieving this, however what i wanted to know is whether or not it was possible to edit how the embedded page is displayed, because users should not know that information is coming from other sites or at least not look as if the page was just stuck in there i.e. it should have the same CSS style sheet applied so it looks as if it were part of our client's site and displayed in the same manner as the propertys they are already selling.

1. Is it possible to edit the look and feel of how information on the embedded page is displayed?

2. Can a specific stylesheet be applied to the pieces of information gathered, as not all of the information will be displayed. Is it possible for example to take specific pieces of information such as price, location, bedrooms etc and have them displayed but have the other pieces of information disabled so the user never sees it (amenities, propery age etc)?

If you know if this is possible, or know of somebody who would know I'd really appreciate a response, as i want to know if we should take on the job or outsource it.

Thanks a million, Grin

Sheena

Hi Sheena,

The answer to your question depends on how your programmer is going to get the information from the external sites...

If they are just using an iframe then I don't think any styling is possible, there are security things that prevent you from changing it.

If they are using something like the PHP Curl function then you should be able to apply regular css styling to it. Using this method you may be able to remove parts of the page before showing it, avoiding the need to hide things with css.

You should probably ask your programmer this question though.

hth
Bob

Thanks for replying Bob.

To be honest with you, the programmer we have is struggling to find a way to achieve this. This was one possible option which we believed woud be the easiest and fastest option (as when property is updated on the original site it woudl be updated on ours also as the information feed was live online)

We thought originally something like the wrapper function in joomla where we could embed a url in the page would be the quickest option, but after looking through some posts im not so sure of how easy it will be to style and have it consistent throughout.

I will look into PHP curl function you mentioned. I'm not really a programmer as such, more of a designer with some basic PHP programming experience, hence the help needed.

- Do you know of any other means of gathering specific details from other site property listings?
- Perhaps there are other sites which would be doing something similar that i could look into? 
- You dont happen to know if there is any software package which would help?

Thanks,
Sheena

You can use the smarty {fetch} plugin (read the smarty docs) to grab the contents of a url, and then just style away.

Are the sites you're pulling from using RSS feeds?

Nullig

No, I don't believe they are using RSS feeds.  One site for example would be www.myhome.ie

Hi Sheena,

I assume you are working with various property sites that will be allowing you to republish their listings? I would expect these sites to provide some kind of data feed that you could use rather than you having to take the information from the front-end website.

You will most likely need to gather all this property data into a database of your own so it can be searched easily. It wouldn't be effective to search through many live websites whilst the visitor waits.

Good luck.
Bob

little wrote: They want to retrieve information from various other sites (auctioneers/real estate) which display property listings  and incorporate the results of a search into their own site - kind of like a one stop shop for finding property.

For instance when a user searches for a particular property using their search form provided, information will be gathered from other sites with property listings based on the search parameters and displayed then to the user on our client's site.  We have a programmer working on some scripts and other means of achieving this, however what i wanted to know is whether or not it was possible to edit how the embedded page is displayed, because users should not know that information is coming from other sites or at least not look as if the page was just stuck in there i.e. it should have the same CSS style sheet applied so it looks as if it were part of our client's site and displayed in the same manner as the propertys they are already selling.

And you are really sure that there's no copyright problem? Hard to belive...

Thomas

Hi there,

In my case we do use the external rss feeds. Is there any way to incorporate them easy into
our news page?

Thank you
S.

Nullig wrote: Are the sites you're pulling from using RSS feeds?

Nullig