Section 2. Crash Course

Overview

This section contains minimum information required to start working with phpRealestate. It discusses the main principles of operation, and provides basic instructions from loging in to the control panel to adding a property to your site. Every key step provides a link to the appropriate section of this manual, which contains a more detailed description. This section contains the following topics:

• Loging in
• Working with the control panel
• Crash Course

Loging in

To start a new session and access the control panel you need to authorize yourself with your unique user name and password. Type in your browser address bar the URL of the control panel. The URL should look similar to this:

http://YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/realestate/realestate-admin

NOTE : replace 'YOUR-DOMAIN.COM' with your real site web address;

replace 'realestate' with a folder name that was created during the phpRealestate installation. This URL ( http://YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/realestate/realestate-admin ) is only an EXAMPLE, do not paste it exactly the same as it is in this example.

The login page will open (see picture1).

Picture 1

Fill in the Login and Password fields and click Login . If your login data are correct, you will see the Control panel.

Working with the control panel

All phpRealestate objects (properties, categories, property fields etc) are differentiated according to the language they belong to. You can see the current language on any page of the control panel. You can change the current language using the Current language select box (see picture 2). Only the objects that belong to the current language are accessible to you at any given time. After you change your current language, you get the access to its objects.

  Picture 2

You can see the phpRealestate menu under the Current language select box (see picture 3). Use this menu to access the lists of existing objects for the current language, e.g. lists of existing properties, categories, fields and checkbox groups. You can also use this menu to add new objects to the current language, manage multilanguage options, customize settings, and get codes to integrate phpRealestate into your site.

  Picture 3

Look at the working area of the control panel displayed below. Depending on your menu selection, this area displays the lists of different objects, forms that allow you to add or customize these objects etc.

The last column of the list of objects (properties, categories, fields etc) contains action buttons which represent different actions. These actions are universal for all the lists. Let's look at them in more detail:

T - Edit

X - Delete

/\ - Move up the list

\/ - Move down the list

> - Expand

\/ - Collapse

Crash course

After you install phpRealestate you can immediately start adding new properties to listings using the predefined categories and other objects. To add a new property, click Properties > Add . A form to add a new property displays . Select one or more categories for a property, choose whether it should be displayed in the list of featured properties, and whether you want to make it immediately available in the lists. You can also select an image to be displayed next to this property in the lists. Other fields of the form allow you to customize other characteristics of the property. After you done with the setting of a new property, click Add new . After you click this button, the new property will appear in the list.

To view the list of properties, click Properties > View / Modify . The last column of the list that is displayed now contains icons that represent available actions. For example, in the edit mode you can add additional images for the property, which will be available full-sized on the detailed description page. The Add new image form and the list of existing images are displayed below the main information of the property.

For more detailed information about managing properties see the Section 4 - Manage properties .

In order to see the properties you added in the admin area on your site you need to integrate the phpRealestate code into the appropriate page of your site. To get this code, choose Get code from menu. As you can see, there are two ways of integration: insert the SSI code and insert the PHP code. Information about how to integrate the code is also available. After you copy the code and insert it into the page, you will see new properties on your site. You can also use the sample files example.php and example.shtml.

For more detailed information about integrating phpRealestate into your side see the Section 7 - Integration.

If the predefined set of categories does not fully meet your requirements, you can add your own categories, as well as delete or modify the existing categories. To view the list of existing categories, click Categories > View/ Modify. A window will open where you can modify the existing categories. To add a new category, click Categories / Add. Fill in the form that shows up and click the Add new button. New category will appear in the list .

For more detailed information about managing categories see the Section 3 - Manage Categories.

If the existing Add new property form does not fully meet your requirements, you can add your own fields, as well as delete or change the existing fields. To view the list of existing fields, click Fields > View / Modify or Check Groups > View / Modify. A window will open where you can manage the existing fields of the property creation form. To add a new field or checkbox group, click Fields / Add and Check Groups > Add respectively. Fill in the form and click Add new. New fields will appear in the list. While editing the Multiple and Select type fields, as well as checkbox groups, you can modify the set of their elements.

If you want to allow users see the newly added fields, you should add a special code to the following files:

ralestate-tmeplates/en/default/info – template of the property detailed description

ralestate-tmeplates/en/default/info-print – print version of this page.

To display a value of any field you should type #FIELD_CODE# in the appropriate place of the template, where CODE is the code of the field you specified while creating it.

For the Multiple type field, as well as checkbox groups, the insertion code looks similar to this:

#MULTIPLE_CODE_default#

#GROUP_CODE_default#

In the above examples you should replace the word CODE with the actual code of the group or field that you want to display in the appropriate place of the template.

Fields can be of different types. The type of the field determines the population of the field with certain values in the admin panel and its appearance on the site. For more detailed information about managing fields see the Section 6 ­­­­ – Manage fields. The Section 8 - Templates and internal tags contains detailed information about phpRealestate template system.

You can duplicate your real estate site in several languages. Besides, every country might have an independent listing associated with it, which contains a unique set of categories and fields. To add a new language , click Languages > Add . Fill in the form that shows up and click Add new to add a new language to the list. Then you can proceed to adding new categories, fields and properties for this language.

For more detailed information about managing multilingual options see the Section 5 – Manage multilingual options.