RealTown Development

<p> RealTown has unveiled its brand new look this weekend and we hope you are as excited about it as we are. The new design is a 6-month collaborative effort between RealTown&#39;s top developers, designers and publishers. </p> <p> Our new look is designed to be attractive yet functional. We have improved the readability by increasing the width of the page, allowing for more high-quality content between pages. </p> <p> One of the most notable changes is RealTown&#39;s home page, which now includes the latest group discussions. We are also planning to showcase a &quot;Welcome to RealTown&quot; video on our homepage which won&#39;t be activated until clicked. </p> <p> Another major change is My RealTown. The feed reader has been given a significant upgrade and now supports more of our own feeds plus customized feeds based on you Friends List. </p> <p> Please let us know what you think of our new look. We are looking forward to hearing your responses. </p>

<p>We noticed an issue earlier today regarding Single Sign On between RealTown and Point2. The issue involved a failure of the new authentication module interfering with the SSO module's ability to save session data.</p> <p>This issue has been fixed and marked as resolved. If you are still experiencing trouble logging in with Single Sign On, please let us know.</p>

<p> We are testing the waters with a &quot;News Feed&quot; utility that keeps you updated on the activity of your RealTown Friends. The News Feed is dependent on your <a href="http://www.realtown.com/myrealtown/friends">Friends List</a> and is a great way to stay updated with your favorite RealTown members. </p> <p> <strong>News Feed</strong> (beta)<br /> <a href="http://www.realtown.com/members/newsfeed/friends">http://www.realtown.com/members/newsfeed/friends</a> </p> <p> The news feed contains publicly available content that was created by your friends along with other notifications. To give you an idea of what will appear in this feed, let&#39;s assume you have a friend named &quot;Joe&quot; in your RealTown Friends List. Each time Joe performs certain activities on RealTown, you will be notified through this News Feed. </p> <p> Here is a list of the items that currently appear in the news feed: </p> <ul> <li> <strong>New Friendships</strong><br /> If Joe becomes friends with another RealTown member, you will see that in your News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Public Groups</strong><br /> When Joe creates a new public group on RealTown, you will see that in your News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Group Memberships</strong><br /> If Joe joins a public RealTown group, you will be notified in the News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Public Group Discussions</strong><br /> Each time Joe creates a new discussion in a public group, you will be notified in the News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Question in the Experts group</strong><br /> If Joe asks a question in the Experts group, you will be notified in the News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Blog Entries</strong><br /> Joe&#39;s latest blog entries will appear in your News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Blog Comments</strong><br /> Each time Joe posts a public comment on any RealTown Blog, you will see that in your News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Community Subscriptions</strong><br /> When Joe subscribes to a public Community, you will be notified in the News Feed. </li> <li> <strong>New Published Articles</strong><br /> When Joe publishes a new article, you will see that in your News Feed. </li> </ul> <p> At first glance, this may seem like a lot of notifications, especially if you have several (100+) RealTown Friends. However, we have imposed some limitations on the types of items that appear in your News Feed, along with how many times the same member can appear in your News Feed. In short, this means that you may not see <em>everything</em> your friends have done, but you&#39;ll see a healthy portion of it. </p> <p> Please let us know what your thoughts are and if you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns. </p>

<p> Let&#39;s share information relative to operating as a property manager. </p> <p> I&#39;ll start. Who has good suggestions for how to do credit checks on potential renters? Most of the companies who offer the service require an inspection of your location. What can we do to get a quick credit check on rental applicants? </p>

<p> It is now much easier for you to invite your RealTown Friends to your groups. If you haven&#39;t built up your RealTown Friends List, now is a great time. </p> <p> To invite your friends to your favorite group, visit the group&#39;s Member List. You can find the link to the group&#39;s Member List at the top of the group&#39;s Latest Discussions page. From the Member List page, click &quot;Invite My Friends&quot;. </p> <p> The following page will display your RealTown Friends and allow you to invite them to the group. Just click the &quot;Invite to Group&quot; link next to the friend you want to invite, confirm the action, and an e-mail will be sent automatically to your friend with a link back to the group. </p> <p> We hope you enjoy this new utility :) </p>

<p> We have rebuilt the <a href="http://www.realtown.com/search">RealTown Content Search</a> page from the ground up to help members and visitors find the documents they are looking for. Some of the major enhancements of this update include: </p> <ul> <li>Faster searching - The search index has been optimized with cached results and higher-quality indexes </li> <li>Advanced search queries - Phrases can be searched for by placing quotes around the phrase. Example: &quot;short sale&quot; </li> <li>Group discussions have been added to the search index. Note: discussions in private groups are <strong>not</strong> searchable. </li> </ul> <p> We have also made several modifications to how the search engine ranks documents. For example, articles with comments are ranked slightly higher than articles without comments. Additionally, completed profiles should rank much higher than incomplete profiles. (Hint: make sure you fill out your profile if you want to be found!) </p> <p> We are also now indexing discussions as a whole instead of each individual reply. This helps increase the quality of search hits and its overall relevance. </p> <p> If you have any questions about RealTown Search please let us know. </p>

<p> We have added &quot;Spell Check&quot; functionality to the editor toolbars found in RealTown Groups and RealTown Articles. The spell checker is powered by the open source software &quot;<a href="http://aspell.net/">GNU Aspell</a>&quot; </p> <p> The spell checker currently uses a standard American-English dictionary. We will be updating this dictionary with additional words as needed. If you find the spell checker is marking a correctly-spelled word as misspelled then please post it here. </p>

<p> For those of you that are Group Organizers and Group Moderators, we have just released a new tool to help you manage the posts in your groups. </p> <p> The tool is called <strong>Post Manager</strong> and is only available to Group Organizers and Group Moderators. To access the Post Manager, click the &quot;Post Manager&quot; link in your group&#39;s discussion list. </p> <p> The Post Manager displays an unthreaded list of all posts submitted to the group. From this page you can preview, edit, and delete any post in your group. This tool is especially useful for those of you who want to have better control over the posts in your groups. </p> <p> We are also going to be rolling out some advanced group features very soon, including the ability to have a fully moderated group. In a fully moderated group, all new posts will require approval by a moderator before being published to the group. This can be very useful in situations where you want to have a public group but monitor the posts before they are published. You can then preview or approve new posts using the Post Manager. Once the post is approved, it will be displayed in your group and your subscribers will be notified. </p> <p> If you have any questions, please post them here. </p>

<p>The &quot;Invite to Group by Email&quot; tool has been updated. If you are inviting people to a private group, the email will now include access tokens to enter the private group in case they cannot get in by normal means (that is,by using the &quot;My Group Invitations&quot; page).</p> <p>If the correct tokens are supplied, the user will be redirected to a &quot;confirm subscription&quot; page.</p> <p>The access tokens can only be used once, so there is no harm if the token is spread around.</p> <p>Please let me know if there are issues with private group invitations.</p>

<p> We have added a new feature to RealTown Groups that allows you to preview a discussion before opening it. For those of you who participate in the RealTown Communities website, you may already be familiar its version of this feature. </p> <p> To enable discussion previews, click the checkbox labeled &quot;Show Summaries&quot; at the top of any discussion list. When this checkbox is checked, you will be able to preview the first post of any discussion when you hover the cursor over its title. </p> <p> This new feature is available on all group discussion lists, as well as Search Results, Recent Discussions and My Discussion Tracker. </p> <p> Please note that this new feature requires a javascript-enabled browser, such as Internet Explorer 6+ or FireFox. </p>

<p> RealTown Groups now offers searching capabilities to help you find discussions of interest. To search group discussions, visit the new <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/search">Discussion Search</a> page. </p> <p> The Discussion Search page gives you powerful searching capabilities to find discussions across all public groups. Additionally, if you are logged in, your search results will also include discussions from your private groups. </p> <p> You can also perform a search within a particular group by using the search form found on that group&#39;s &quot;All Discussions&quot; page. </p> <p class="c1"> <strong>Advanced Searching Options</strong> </p> <p> You can perform advanced search queries directly from the input field by specifying the field you want to search for. For example, you can search for discussions that John Reilly has participated in by searching for &quot;author:John Reilly&quot;. </p> <p> Here&#39;s a list of all of the available search fields and how they work: </p> <ul> <li> <strong>Author:</strong> Searches the &quot;posted by&quot; field for posts written by the specified author. </li> <li> <strong>Subject:</strong> Limit your search to only the subject field. </li> <li> <strong>Contents:</strong> Limit your search to only the post contents. </li> </ul> <p> For the geek in all of us, the Discussion Search also supports boolean operators. In plain English, words like &quot;AND&quot; and &quot;OR&quot; can be used to help direct the search engine on what to find. </p> <p> For example, searching for &quot;realtor <strong>AND</strong> agency&quot; will return results that contain both of the words. If you search for &quot;realtor <strong>OR</strong> agency&quot;, then discussions matching either of the two words will be returned. </p> <p> You can also use the word <strong>NOT</strong> to exclude results that contain a certain phrase. For example, if you searched for &quot;realtor <strong>NOT</strong> agency&quot; will return all discussions that contain the word &quot;realtor&quot; and not the word &quot;agency&quot;. </p> <p> If you have any questions about Discussion Search please let us know. </p>

<p> We&#39;ve enabled two new pages for RealTown Groups that we believe many will find useful: Recent Discsussions and My Discussion Tracker. </p> <p> <b>Recent Discussions</b><br /> <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/recent" rel="nofollow">http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/recent</a> </p> <p> This page is very useful to see what&#39;s happening at RealTown Groups. It displays a list of all of the recently updated discussions across all public groups. This page is available to the public without the need to log in to RealTown. </p> <p> However, if you are logged in, the Recent Discussions page will also include discussions from any private groups you may be subscribed to (in addition to the public discussions). </p> <p> <b>My Discussion Tracker</b><br /> <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/tracker" rel="nofollow">http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/tracker</a> &lt;- requires login </p> <p> My Discussion Tracker is similar to Recent Discussions but is limited to only the discussions you have already previously viewed, which is why it requires you to log in. In other words, think of this page as a way to ask RealTown to show you a list of all the posts you&#39;ve read before so you can check for new replies (discussions with unseen replies will be bolded in the list). </p>

<p>We have just released a major update for your member profiles. The new profiles include some fancy new features along with numerous optimizations.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><u><b>New Features</b></u></p> <p><b>Applets</b><br /> Each of the main sections on your profile are like mini-applications (aka applets). We have plans to introduce more applets very soon (in addition to the ones introduced in this release).</p> <p><b>Friends List Applet</b><br /> Your profile will now show up to 10 of your recently added friends. We have plans to futher customize this applet.</p> <p><b>Groups Applet</b><br /> Your profile now displays the groups you have created along with the groups you are a member of.</p> <p><b>Other Applets</b><br /> Several of the existing applets have been improved as well.</p> <p><b>Applet Ordering</b><br /> The various applets on your profile can now be dragged up or down to order them as you choose. To do this, simply log in to RealTown and visit your own profile, and then drag the titles of the applets up or down. The order you choose will be saved automatically.</p> <p><u><b>Optimizations</b></u></p> <p>Along with the new features, we have highly optimized your profiles to help them load faster. We have enabled server caching for the profiles to make them as fast as possible. Please note that it may take up to 24 hours for certain parts of your profile to be updated.</p> <p>Your hobbies, interests, and activities have always linked to a search results page of other members that share that same property, but now the resutls will come up much faster. This means more people will be able to find you faster if you keep your profile filled out.</p> <p>Please take a moment to view your own profile today and let us know if you have any thoughts.</p>

<p>We have been making some significant changes to RealTown and one of them includes a rewrite of the base code. Initially, RealTown was created entirely from scratch, but once the site began to grow, so did our code base. The biggest obstacle for our developers was the learning curve -- not only did they have to know PHP, but they had to learn RealTown's custom PHP code.</p> <p>After many discussions and meetings, we came to the conclusion that RealTown needs to be in a framework. A framework is a common set of programming code that developers can learn once and use to build many sites. Most frameworks also have a very large developer community, meaning our own development questions can be answered from people outside our 4 walls.</p> <p>Once we were certain that a framework was necessary, we had to answer the next big question: which framework to choose?</p> <p>If you're a PHP developer, you probably have heard of or even used several of the popular frameworks out there. You may have even written your own. We needed something that was not only powerful but had a strong user community. Our two main choices were <a href="http://cakephp.org/">CakePHP</a> and <a href="http://framework.zend.com">Zend Framework</a>.</p> <p>To help familiarize ourselves with the two frameworks, we dove right in to rebuilding some of our applications in them. CakePHP had the best learning curve, where we could have a basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) application up in less than an hour. We began rebuilding our Communities application in CakePHP, and we are currently in the process of migrating each of the Communities over to the new platform.</p> <p>To check out the new Communities, <a href="http://www.realtown.com/community-beta">click here</a>.</p> <p>Part-way through the development of the new Communities, we decided to explore the Zend Framework. Setting up a website took a little more time than it did with CakePHP, but once everything was configured it started to become easier.</p> <p>It was around this time that we decided we need to let our own RealTown members create <i>their own</i> communities. We decided to tackle this project as a completely new application written in the Zend Framework. The learning curve of Zend Framework paid off as it is extremely powerful and flexible once you get the hang of it.</p> <p>The &quot;Member Communities&quot; that you are seeing here is powered by the Zend Framework. Also, the &quot;login&quot; page is also now powered by the Zend Framework to take advantage of its powerful Zend_Auth component.</p> <p>Working with two frameworks can be just as confusing as developing under a custom one, so we are slowly rewriting the entire website in the Zend Framework.</p> <p>The first of RealTown's current applications to be re-written in Zend is the RealTown Articles. The new Articles application will have new features and better usability, especially in the area of comments. We will then rewrite the rest of RealTown, starting with the homepage. The Blogs application is going to be re-written as well, so you longer will need to be redirected to the old &quot;realtownblogs.com&quot; web server for managing your blogs.</p>