Open-Realty v3.0 released

Open-Realty v3.0 released!

Ryan Bonham

June 14, 2010

On behalf of Transparent Technologies, Inc., I would like to announce the immediate release and availability of Open-Realty® v3.0.

With this release we have added many new and exciting features and optimizations, and re-written a considerable amount of the core, making this our finest and most powerful version of Open-Realty® to date. We have greatly improved our blogging system, added the ability to automatically post listings and blog posts to Twitter, enhanced our listing editor, rewritten our listing field editor to be much easier to use adding drag and drop support, and we squashed a big pile of bugs that were reported by the community. More than 100 user requested items/improvements were addressed alone. Of no small consequence, we have also changed the Open-Realty® license. Open-Realty® from this point forward will be licensed as a commercial product, backed with available commercial support. I will address our new license changes first, then I will discuss a few of the new features we have added.

Why did we change the license and what does this mean? The reason for the licensing change is not really a simple explanation and there is more to this decision than would fit here, but there are two primary reasons.

First, for those of you who do not know me, I am a big advocate of open source software and I have loved developing Open-Realty® (OR) and moreover, being able to keep it open source and free since 2002. I have been working within the open source community since long before it was a "trendy" or a marketable thing to do. Having said that, be assured I did not come to the decision to change OR's licensing easily, but the sheer costs of developing, maintaining, and supporting OR for free as we have for the last 8 years is just not sustainable. Transparent Technonogies can no longer subsidize the very large number of individuals who benefit from OR every day and even earn their living from it, who also expect support, but do not contribute to OR's development.

Second, certain individuals have taken OR's open source program code and some of our copyrighted commercial program code and they have re-distributed both (for profit) in ways that violate our licensing while at the same time they publicly and privately associate themselves with our well established brand. Other actions by these same individuals indicate they intend to cause financial harm to myself and Transparent Technologies and they intend to continue creating confusion within the marketplace. This situation even further exacerbates the problem with OR's sustainability that I already mentioned above.

What does this licensing change mean for you the Open-Realty® user?

We will still offer a FREE version of Open-Realty® , but our program code will no longer be fully open-source, and you will have to register to download it. The free version requires that you display a "Powered By Open-Realty®" logo visibly on your web site.
For users who require commercial support including the ability to remove the "powered by" logo, we have a Site License available for $149. This license includes one year of professional support & upgrades for a single site, after which you can opt to to renew at any time for $60/year.
Ongoing development of Open-Realty® will now be commercially funded, ideally this means more new features, much more often.

That covers our licensing changes, but let's move on to why you are reading this at all, I want to highlight just a few of the new features in Open-Realty® v3.0.

Blog Publisher - Our old Blog Manager has received a complete overhaul and a new name, resulting in the creation of a premium and fully integrated blogging solution for real estate professionals.

Blogging has become a useful tool that savvy and ambitious real estate professionals can use to agressively market themselves and their properties. We feel it is important to have as many useful tools available under a single interface as possible instead of trying to manage a hodge-podge of separate web applications, while allowing users more flexibility in marketing their listings and services.

We have added many new features to the Blog Publisher and have vastly improved the layout.

Category/Subcategory Support
Post Tag & Tag Cloud Support
Pingback Support
Customizable SEO-friendly Permanent Links
Archive Support
RSS Post Feeds
RSS Comment Feeds
Wordpress Inject

We are especially excited about Open-Realty's® new ability to import content from existing Wordpress blogs (Wordpress Inject), which makes the transition from using a Wordpress blog to using Open-Realty's® integrated Blog Publisher a snap.

Listing Editor - The listing editor has been completely revamped. The field layout now mimics the Open-Realty® Listing Detail page for easier location of information.

Our new layout combined with our new media widget allows you to edit all the listing information, photos, files, and virtual tours from a single screen. This allows for much faster and easier listing management. The display is fully templated, so web designers can re-arrange virtually everything.

A large focus of this upgrade was making the administration areas like this more streamlined to allow users to spend more of their time doing their regular jobs, and less time updating a website.

Add-on Manager - Add-ons are now easier to install with automatic downloads and installation avaliable from our official add-on site.

Locate Free and Commercial add-ons quickly and easily. We hope this new Add-on Manager combined with the Add-on Site will help encourage more add-on developers to produce and keep their add-ons updated and will help users find the tools they need.

These are but just a few of the exciting new features that we have added to this release. I will be blogging more about the new features and our plans for Open-Realty® over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

03:02 PM