User New Listing Notification Addon

[jtgolden54]

I have personally received a lot of support from the OR community and I recently did this addon for one of my websites and thought I would share it for those in similar circumstances.

This addon is specifically designed for those sites that do backend listing updates utilizing either RETS, IDX, or CSV mechanisms or for sites that have a significant number of new listings added on a regular basis and want to send users a single email a day. It is recommended, that if you utilize this addon that the Email Users Listing Notification option of the site’s configuration be set to ‘No’.

The addon determines new listing status by comparing the creation date of the listing to the current date and is designed to be executed once a day. Thus this action is ideally suited to be executed as a cron job using curl. However, it can be run manually from the Admin page as well. When ran manually it will prompt to ensure you really want to email all applicable users with today’s new listings; answering 'YES' will then execute the notification function and for each email sent an entry will be entered into the site log for admin verification purposes. Depending on the number of user saved searches and the day's new listings it may take a little while to complete.

The curl cron job should execute: "http://YourSite'sUrl/admin/index.php?action=addon_dailynotify_email". If you utilize a cron job and have other agents accessing your admin page you could comment out the addon icon to ensure multiple notifications are never sent.

The new listings are used in conjunction with registered users who have saved searches and have indicated that they wish to receive email notification of new listings matching their search criteria. The HTML email sent will have your company name in the title and contain each new listing’s clickable URL along with the name of the saved search that generated the notification.

I have been utilizing this addon for about a week and am pleased with its ability to keep users coming back to the site. Once I turned it on, I was also happy to see some users that had not visited the site recently return to browse the daily new listings.

This addon is a bit crude in appearance, limited in its functions, and has only been tested on OpenRealty 2.5.2, however the price is right. To install, simply unzip the attached file in the /addons directory and you should see the 'New Listings Notification' icon on your admin page your next login.

Kind Regards,

Tim