Customising AgentPress so it's not for real estate

[CleanPageDom]

Firstly, hi, my name's Dom and I build sites in WordPress for a living (some with Genesis, some not).

I've had an enquiry from a client looking to do something similar to Bride Rush with the sortable menu for local offers. I had a brainwave (!) that maybe a real-estate-based theme may be a way to go here, listing offers instead of properties and assigning values of cost, location and type to what would traditionally be "house price", "location" and "detached/apartment etc".

Having just built a site using Metro, I'm sold on the out-of-the-box awesomeness of SP themes.

So, my question is this: is the AgentPress theme wholly geared towards real estate, or would it be fairly straightforward to adapt it to my needs? I'm thinking particularly in terms of customising the drop-down selectors and changing the "property"-geared headings. I'm fairly comfortable with functions.php and child themes. I saw a couple of non-real-estate AgentPress sites in the showcase, but they seemed to have removed the search feature altogether.

Any help gratefully received. Looking forward to hopefully making a valuable contribution to the forum.

Thanks
Dom

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Let’s build a website together…

http://www.cleanpagedesign.co.uk

[David Chu]

Hi Dom,
Welcome. That's an interesting question. It's always nice to be able to build upon something that already has features if possible.

I looked at that bride site. It looks very nice, even though it's using the dreaded Joomla (did I say that?). 🙂 Accordingly, it has world-record numbers of CSS files and Javascript files. There's a LOT in there. Lightboxes in each individual page, fancy tabs, on and on. In fact, I'll get requests for a "site like that", and they'll say, "can you do that for 150 euros?" Um, not sure about that!

Could Agentpress be tricked out to do something like that? I don't have Agentpress, but I can offer a couple thoughts. It looks to me as though Agentpress relies heavily upon Custom Post Types, and the templating thereof. Since you're comfortable working with functions and child themes, you may be able to make that happen. I'm guessing you'd need significant CSS chops to handle it, too. Like any of these "build on top" situations, if what they're asking for is not too far from Agentpress, I'd say that it could be viable.

But if it were too different from Agentpress, I would go from scratch, use Custom Post Types and nice templates for those, and build a search that would handle them. Stock WordPress search is, as developers know, not the greatest, so often a custom solution is needed, or possibly a plugin if you're lucky.

Going back to Agentpress, if I were modding it significantly, I'd be careful to segregate my custom functions and CSS as much as possible so that updating the theme is not a nightmare. Also, don't forget that Agentpress isn't Genesis 2 capable yet, so that may be worth thinking about.

Probably more thoughts than you bargained for. 🙂 I hope that's helpful, and maybe an Agentpress hacker might chime in.

Cheers, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[CleanPageDom]

Hi Dave

Thanks for such a thorough response. I've looked into the Bride Rush site a little more and realised it's essentially an eCommerce site rather than what I thought it was - a search and reference site. The customer needs to be able to choose a deal and then purchase a voucher, which then gets passed on to the company offering the deal. Bride Rush seems to be an intermediary creaming a little off the top for having all of these deals in one, searchable place.

So I guess I'm going to have to go down the standard eCommerce route and work out how to get those dropdown category sorters working. That being said, I'm struggling to find a plugin or extension that provides that functionality. Woothemes seems to come the closest with its Product Finder extension so I might venture down that path. For the budgets we're talking about (a little more than €150, but not too much more!) I need an out-of-the-box solution ideally.

Interestingly, I was asked this morning about building a site for an estate agent, so I might be coming back to AgentPress for its intended purpose,and less messing about 🙂

Thanks again
Dom

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Let’s build a website together…

[David Chu]

Dom,
That's a good point... if loads of ecommerce is needed, it's usually best not to re-invent the wheel. Woo stuff is pretty good. I'm often asked to wrangle its appearance back into shape for various formatting issues.

As I told a designer colleague, you may want to play with the appearance of the various Woo plugin product layouts before committing to an exact design to show the client. That way, you won't end up needing to change every little bit of their styling and layout, which is quite a chore.

This thought process was useful to me as well - I can imagine getting requests similar to that later on.

Cheers, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

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