Hey there, thanks again for the thread! I’ve got a bit more info for you below:
We want to display all of our Broker’s listings separately
Absolutely, just to start, check out this page: https://wordpress-demo.simplyrets.com/documentation
That page will show you all of the “filters” we support. The one you’re looking for here is “brokers”. All you need is to give the short-code your broker’s MLS ID, and the plugin will take care of the rest.
You can, if it helps, provide multiple broker IDs in the same short-code.
and we also want to display other local listings from other brokers in categories by town (Orlando, Miami, etc.) or even by type (Beachfront, Waterfront, etc) in a different section on the same page like this website:
Right, so the only limitation you will hit here is that you cannot filter *out* your brokerage from the list. So, one a page like this you would just omit the “brokers” parameter I mentioned above, and it will show listings from all brokerages in the MLS.
And just to clarify – your broker’s listings will still show up on this page/section.
Is categorizing by areas or other search filters possible to do with your plugin? Will this slow the page load time?
Categorizing by area and property type is for sure good to go. We have a pretty robust set of “location” related filters (city, neighborhood, postal code, counties, etc), so you can definitely build pages specific to these areas/filters.
For page load time, actually no, it won’t slow it down at all! In general, the more “filters” you use the faster it will be since you are “narrowing down” the amount of listings that need to be searched.
Also, do you have variations on how to manipulate the layout of the listings – 3 columns across, 4 across, etc.?
Great question. The plugin doesn’t support a grid-layout out of the box (but I will put in a +1 to our team, we’ve heard the use-case before).
Right now the best way to do this is with custom CSS. We actually have a CSS style guide here so you can see all of the classes and IDs the plugin uses: https://docs.simplyrets.com/simply-rets-client.html
I do know many other users have done this, but personally I have not set it up this way myself (though we can usually help with CSS issues if you hit them).
Hope this helps!
Cody