Integration with Real Estate portals
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Integration with Real Estate portals

[Important]Important

This feature is available only inside the professional version of Domus Organizer

Domus Organizer is integrated with several different real estate portals: you can automatically import properties from the remote portal into your Joomla or export your site properties on the remote portal.

Each integration has a CLI script that allows you to perform such tasks automatically. You have to setup a CRON job on your server and at the given time the script will import or export your properties.

CREA integration

Domus Organizer is integrated with the CREA (Canadian Real Estate Association) system: you can automatically import inside your site the properties listed on the portal.

Installation and configuration

[Warning]PHP 5.4 or later is required

In order to connect to CREA servers, we have to use some external libraries; sadly, those libraries requires PHP 5.4 or later installed on your server.

This means that you must have PHP 5.4 installed on your server or you won't be able to use CREA import feature (Domus Organizer will continue to work as usual)

Before using this integration you have to enable the following plugins:

  • Domus Organizer Imports - CREA, group domusimport

  • Domus Organizer Integrations - CREA, group domusintegrations

The first one is an additional plugin and due its size it's not shipped in the extension package, you have to download it from our download page.

Once you have installed it and enabled them both, you can actually start to configure them.

Configure the access details

Access details are stored inside every agency, this means that on a single site you can have different CREA users; in the edit view you will found some additional fields regarding the access details and the last import run.

CREA username

Username used to access CREA services

CREA password

Password used to access CREA services

Fetch properties of these agents only

Import only the properties belonging to this user. This is useful when the same CREA account is shared between more agencies and you want to import only a specific user.

[Note]Note

Please note that CREA does not offer any API to search given a specific user, this means that we have to download all the properties inside a feed and then import only the correct ones. For example if your agent has only 5 properties but your feed contains 2000 properties, we have to fetch them all just to import those 5 ones.

[Important]Important

Please double check the name of the agent, we are using it to check if a property really belongs to the user(s) we are interested into.

Last Update

Date of the last update

Offset

Offset that will be applied in the next run. CREA allows us to download only 100 properties in each execution, so we have to save the starting point for the next run

[Tip]How to reset an import?

If you ever need to reset an import, you simply have to blank out the Last Update and Offset fields, this means that Domus Organizer will "forget" any previous action and start again from scratch.

Configure the import

After that, you have to configure the import plugin, too:

Sandbox

The sandbox has a different end point, if you are using the demo accounts you have to set this option to Yes

Create new categories here

If during the import we have a new category, where should we create it?

Type

The type that will be assigned to the import property

Auto-publish properties

Should we automatically publish the new properties?

Limit

How many properties should we fetch? The maximum amount allowed by CREA site is 100, however you can lower this value if you experience timeouts

Photo limit

By default we will try to download all the photo belonging to a property, however you can limit the amount of photos if you are experiencing timeouts or if you are interested only on a smaller subset

Configure property elements

Finally you have to link CREA attributes to property elements: in this way you will "translate" remote attributes in your site ones.

The element could be an Input or a Select list one: if you know that the values are part of a limited set of choices (for example Yes, No), you should select Select list, otherwise use the Input type

Import data from CREA server

Now that you have configured everything, you can actually start to import data inside your site. You can do that in two ways: manually triggering the import or use the CLI script.

Manual import

This is the simplest way to quickly test if everything is working as expected.

Inside the backend area of Domus Organizer, visit the Utilities » Import page; then choose CREA import as import engine. Finally, select the agency where you want to import the new properties and hit the Restore button.

That's it!

Domus Organizer will start fetching data from the remote server and import it inside your site.

[Note]Import limit

Importing the properties could be a very long task and you could easily incur in timeouts, that's why the manual import has an hard limit of 10 properties.

Remember the manual import is just for testing purposes, you should run this task automatically from the CLI using the steps illustrated in the next chapter.

Automated import

Once everything is correctly working, you can set up a CRON job to automatically import the new properties. You simple have to use this command:

/usr/local/bin/php /home/USER/webroot/cli/domus-crea.php

where /usr/local/bin/php is the path to your PHP CLI executable and /home/USER/webroot is the absolute path to your web site's root. You can get this information from your host.

Once again, that's it! Once it's set, your site will fetch the latest properties from CREA servers and import them inside your site, automatically.

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