We’re handing the mic over to Paul Morris from Superb Digital, who’s here to talk about something that’s on a lot of agents’ minds right now. With portal fees climbing and control slipping further away, Paul lays out why building your own online presence is smart and essential.

Over to Paul!

Estate agents have long been expressing their frustration over Rightmove’s market dominance and fee increases. The sense of small to medium sized agents feeling marginalised by the platform’s pricing structure is yet again reaching boiling point, with the latest fee hike of a whopping 18% adding fuel to the fire. 

“Rightmove’s latest 18 per cent price hike is outrageous. Zoopla and On The Market, as night follows day, will do the same and the thumbscrew will tighten further around the financial genitals of the agents,”  as Trevor Abrahmsohn, founder of OnTheMarket, rather bluntly puts it.

Calls for change are growing louder than ever before, but there’s also a sense of resignation in the industry. Like any dominant online platform, the network effect makes it incredibly difficult for individual agencies to affect change. 

This isn’t really new, of course. Estate agents across the UK have long depended on Rightmove as a primary channel for property listings but this reliance has always come with significant, often overlooked, costs that can impact the sustainability and profitability of estate agencies over the long term.

Escalating Portal Fees

Rightmove’s financial model has increasingly burdened estate agents with rising costs. Despite a relatively flat growth in its customer base, Rightmove reported a 7% increase in revenue, amounting to £389.9 million in 2024. This surge is attributed to higher charges imposed on existing clients rather than an expansion in service offerings. The average revenue per advertiser (ARPA) rose by £93 to £1,524 per month, indicating a trend of extracting more value from the current customer base.

This upward trajectory in fees has sparked concern among industry professionals. Shaun Adams, who has called for a CMA petition against Rightmove’s fee increases, criticised the company’s recent marketing campaign as a “slap in the face” to agents already paying substantial fees.

Stagnant Agency Commissions

While Rightmove’s revenues have climbed, estate agents’ commissions have not seen a corresponding increase. Industry experts highlight that agency fees have remained stagnant or even declined, despite rising property prices. This disparity places additional financial strain on agents who are simultaneously facing increased operational costs.

Diminished Control Over Listings

Relying heavily on Rightmove also means ceding control over how properties are presented and marketed. The platform’s standardised listing formats limit agents’ ability to differentiate their offerings. Furthermore, the competitive nature of the portal can lead to a race to the bottom, where properties are judged primarily on price rather than unique features or value-added services.

Risk of Market Monopolisation

Rightmove’s dominant position in the UK property portal market raises concerns about monopolistic practices. With limited alternatives, estate agents may find themselves with little negotiating power, making them susceptible to unfavorable terms and conditions imposed by the portal.

Building a Digital Presence You Own

For many estate agents, the idea of reducing reliance on property portals like Rightmove can seem like a pipedream, especially when vendor expectations and lead volumes are tied so strongly to them. But as dependency deepens and costs continue to rise, more agents are beginning to explore how they can reassert control over their marketing, their brand, and ultimately, their pipeline.

More and more are waking up to the idea that they can build a reliable digital presence that they own.

It’s something we’ve seen working in practice for estate agents, at Superb Digital. 

We don’t advocate that estate agents dump Rightmove entirely. That would be unrealistic. But building a business model entirely dependent on a third party platform like Rightmove, is both risky and unreliable.

Instead, build your marketing strategy as if Rightmove didn’t exist. 

This idea isn’t about switching off a vital lead source overnight. It’s about rebalancing the scales. A robust, multi-channel marketing strategy, built around platforms and assets you control, can help mitigate the risks of overreliance on any one portal.

Your Website: Getting the Foundations Right

The foundation of any owned digital strategy is your website. Unlike listings on portals, your website is a long-term asset that you own and one that can be shaped around your brand, optimised for search engines, and tailored to attract and convert your ideal clients.

Your website should be something you’re proud to send people to and it should do more than just list properties. It should showcase your knowledge, capture leads, and build your brand online.

Alongside powerful CRMs like Property Hive, your website is perfectly capable of bringing your services, industry knowledge, property listings and enquiries together in one place. And this is scalable, meaning even smaller agencies can begin with modest functionality and grow significantly over time.

Building an Audience that Know you

Portals act as middlemen. They capture attention and enquiries, but they don’t share the full picture. By contrast, estate agents with a search engine optimised website can start to build direct relationships with potential clients. They can help you capture email addresses, with which you can leverage email marketing to stay relevant and on the radar of sellers and landlords.

Your contact list is gold dust. Whether it’s people booking valuations, subscribing to alerts, or downloading area guides, that’s your audience. And it’s yours, to engage with on your terms through newsletters, campaigns, and tailored follow-ups.

Regular email communications, property updates, and tailored content can nurture leads more effectively than relying solely on a platform that controls visibility and communication flow.

Scale at Your Own Pace

A fully fledged multi-channel digital strategy may well feel out of reach for some agents. But you don’t need to do everything at once. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all.

Start with what’s realistic for your business. That could be as simple as improving your website, launching a monthly newsletter, or posting one useful article a month. The important thing is to start and to own the channels you’re building on.

A phased approach allows agents to experiment with different content types and platforms, test what resonates with their audience, and grow momentum gradually.

Agents must also adapt to changing user behaviours. When we searched for properties using ChatGPT’s web interface recently (see image below), none of the top results were from Rightmove. They came from smaller portals and agents’ own websites. With Google’s dominance under threat from Gen AI like Chat GPT, it’s in no way certain that Rightmove’s dominance will persist.

Source: Chat GPT

As market conditions shift and digital behaviours evolve, the need to build a presence beyond third-party platforms is becoming not just a strategic advantage, but a necessity. By investing in assets you own, such as your website, online content, marketing lists and social media followings, you can start to take back control. This helps strengthen your brand and build more sustainable, direct relationships with your audience.

The journey may take time, but for those willing to start, the payoff is a business built on firmer foundations than Rightmove can offer.

Author Bio: Paul Morris is Managing Director of Bristol based Superb Digital, who help estate agents generate more instructions and grow their agencies online. 

The post How to Move Beyond Rightmove and Create a Digital Presence you Own appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

In the world of programming we’re constantly learning (often the hard way). I think this is one of the key attractions for me in that the learning curve never seems to cease, so in that vein, I’d like to share with you 5 more lessons learnt from building WordPress plugins and share them with you below.

Version control

The importance of using a version control system such as Git cannot be overstated. It allows you to track changes, revert to previous states, and manage updates efficiently. This is especially important when working in teams as it allows continuous integration and deployment of your plugin.

Not only that, create a public repository and make it open source so anybody can contribute to the codebase. We’ve written in the past about how open source software is beneficial.

Performance optimisation

On your local test site where you’ve been developing your plugin you might add 10 sample records to play about with. But what about in the real-world where you’ve got tens of thousands of records, 5 users logging in at once, and thousands of visitors a day. It’s imperative that any code is optimised so as to not slow down a website, especially when page speed has an impact on SEO rankings, you don’t want to be the culprit for a site not performing at it’s best.

Some examples of optimising your plugin include:

• Minimising database queries
• Compressing any JS or CSS
• Use WordPress’s built-in functions where possible (get_option() etc comes with in-built caching)
• Store data efficiently in the database so it can be easily queried

At Property Hive we see estate agency sites with 10,000+ properties so it’s key that it can handle searches and query this amount of data with ease.

Document it well

Nobody likes writing documentation. It can seem boring, laborious, and time consuming, especially when you’ve got a to do list as long as your arm full of cool new features you could be building instead.

But good documentation has a number of benefits:

• It reduces support by allowing users to find answers to their queries themselves without having to bother you.
• It improves customer retention. Ever abandoned a project because the documentation wasn’t clear?
• It’s a sales tool. You might think documentation is only for existing users? Believe it or not, potential users will browse the documentation before they’ve even used the plugin.

Add as many hooks, actions and filters as possible

Add actions and filters everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Every bit of output, every list of options, every set of arguments passed to queries, and so forth. This gives other developers the opportunity to customise the plugin to their or their customers needs without you having to make core changes to the plugin.

Make hook naming conventions consistent, and document them somewhere with examples on how one might use the hook in question.

Listen to feedback

Lastly, actively seek out and listen to feedback from the users of your plugin. Whether it’s through support forums, user reviews, or direct emails, feedback can guide future development, define where you spend your time, highlight issues you hadn’t considered, and reveal what users truly value. Taking feedback on board, both positive and negative, is key for continuous improvement and innovation in plugin development.

If you’re thinking about developing a WordPress plugin, I hope the 5 more lessons learnt from building WordPress plugins here, as well as the ones I wrote about previously, are of some use. Stay tuned for more insightful tips in the future.

The post 5 More Lessons Learnt From Building WordPress Plugins appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

It seems that every day there is a new article published about a popular WordPress plugin installed on millions of sites having had a vulnerability found. We don’t have millions of users (yet) but for the estate agents we do work with, we want to make sure our offering is as secure as possible.

We’ve just released version 2.0.10 of Property Hive which contained a couple of tweaks surrounding improved security. As a result I wanted to take this as an opportunity to speak more about security and outline what we do behind the scenes.

We’ve written in the past about how as a WordPress user you can keep your site safe, but unfortunately you have no control over the code for the individual plugins installed on your site. This is where we come in…

What do we do to make Property Hive secure?

Sanitise input

We ensure that all data input by users, both on the frontend and in the WordPress backend, is sanitised. This means that we clean the data to ensure it’s in the right format before it’s used by our system or stored in the database.

Escape output

Before any data from Property Hive is sent to be displayed on a user’s screen, we escape it. This means we make sure any data that could potentially be interpreted as code (such as HTML or JavaScript) is safely outputted, preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.

Nonces

Nonces means Numbers Used ONCE. They’re a security measure used to protect against CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) attacks. We use nonces in Property Hive to ensure that any action or request made is genuine and originated from the site, preventing unauthorized actions.

Validate users capabilities

We check and validate the capabilities of each user, ensuring that they have the permission to perform the actions they are attempting. This way, sensitive features and data are only accessible to users with the appropriate level of access.

Use as much WordPress in-built functionality as possible

WordPress comes with a wide range of built-in functions that are regularly updated and maintained for security. By leveraging these functions wherever possible, Property Hive benefits from the robust security measures of WordPress itself.

We work with vulnerability database Patchstack

Patchstack is a great site where people can declare vulnerabilities that they’ve found in plugins. They’re sent to us in private first and we’re given a period of time to resolve them before it’s made public.

It’s never nice to hear that you’ve got a vulnerability in your code (we’ve had about 6 discovered in nearly 10 years) but it’s satisfying to have it fixed knowing you’ve potentially saved thousands of estate agents site from being compromised. This is why it’s so important to keep your plugins up to date.

We’re open source

Being open source means that anyone can examine our code. This transparency is a strength as it allows security researchers and our userbase to identify, report, and even fix, potential security issues. We believe that this collaborative approach leads to a more secure plugin for everyone to benefit from..

Closing words

We understand the importance of security in the digital age, especially for estate agents who handle sensitive client information. That’s why we are committed to maintaining the highest standards to keep Property Hive secure, ensuring that our users can focus on their business without worrying about the security of their data.

Saying that, no plugin or software is 100% safe. Even if you run the latest version of all plugins, that still doesn’t mean someone couldn’t gain access through an insecure server. Our own website has been the victim of hacking in the past and it really is crippling. Don’t leave it too late to realise how important security is. Take what steps you can to secure your property website today.

The post How Secure is Property Hive? appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

Martin’s ambition however is to become a developer and, being all about growth and self development, we’re on board with facilitating this. Ultimately this will allow him to debug issues and offer better support so it’s also in the business’s interest to encourage this as well.

Our Director and Lead Developer Steve has been training Martin and giving masterclasses in coding Wizardry! We asked Steve to shed light on his experiences and give us his top tips.

So here goes… Our top seven training tips for training a Junior Developer:

Start from the ground up

When teaching someone the basics of development it’s easy to forget that even “simple” things (variables, operators, data types etc) might not be familiar to the junior in question. Don’t assume they know anything and start from the ground up with basic explanations and simple examples.

Instill good practices from the beginning

I’m a sucker for best practices. Neat code formatting, tidy file structure, commenting and clear commit messages are a few examples of this. I think it’s important to discuss these right from the outset to avoid any bad habits. These skills are invaluable when working in a team.

Recap and repeat

When learning any new skill it’s important to always go back and recap on what’s already been taught. Instead of ploughing ahead with learning new stuff all the time, take a moment to go back now and again to recap on lessons already taught. The more you reiterate on what’s being taught, the more ingrained it will be.

Design tasks and tests they can go off and do themselves

My favourite thing to do with a junior is to design tasks or tests that they can go off and do themselves. Some people learn best by trial and error, or having to go off and do their own research, instead of having perfect working examples shown to them all the time.

An example of this is a new add on we needed writing to export properties from Property Hive to a new property portal. This was a big ask but I gave Martin a specification, a breakdown of the steps required to reach the end goal, and set him on his way. We checked in regularly to see how he was getting on but the majority of it was done with no hand holding and gave him the freedom to get things wrong with no one looking over his shoulder and to just have a play around.

Give them time to absorb the knowledge

Our training sessions are short, maybe an hour or two at a time, and then we stop there until a few days later. A full day training or trying to cover too much in one sitting is mentally energy sapping for everyone involved. Keep it to short, digestible, sessions and this will prove much better in the long run.

Don’t be scared to throw them in at the deep end

I mentioned the add on above that was a big task for a junior to undertake. However Martin probably learnt more doing that than all of our sessions put together. It gave him exposure to a wide array of functions and practices and how everything ties together as opposed to doing everything in isolation. It covered OOP, Git, PHP and JavaScript, all in one task.

Use real world examples in training

Let’s take PHP FTP functionality as an example. We could do a session on this and discuss all the functions involved and write sample script after sample script, but try to also coincide this with real world examples. We looked at this in the context of the BLM Export and how you might use FTP functionality to send a BLM file to a third party. This makes it a lot clearer and allows the junior to see how this would be used day-to-day.

If you’re training a junior developer or are going through training yourself, hopefully these tips have given you food for thought and will help you to grow your teams skills.

The post 7 Lessons Learnt Training a Junior Developer appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

In this post we’ll outline just a few of the reasons why we believe Property Hive to be a great solution for your new property business:

Cost Effective

You’ve probably heard of the phrase “You get what you pay for”, but that’s not the case with Property Hive. With budget being an important factor when starting a business, we’ve developed an off-the-shelf solution that provides everything needed to get you up and running.

Believe it or not, most of the functionality needed to run an estate agency website and CRM software is included as part of the free plugin. Yes, you read that right: completely 100% free.

As we don’t have physical offices or expensive hosting and servers to worry about, we can offer Property Hive and it’s features at an incredible price.

Don’t believe us? Have a quick peek at the video below (around the 4:17 mark) where these industry experts discuss how they’d use Property Hive to power their start-up:

Extendable

“If Property Hive is free how do you make money?“. This is a common question we get asked and the answer comes in the form of our premium add ons. Any special or advanced functionality normally exists as an add on. This might be a real-time feed to Rightmove, a map search for your website, or SMS integration for your CRM, these simply bolt onto your existing installation of Property Hive.

We have over 50 add ons at a range of prices that can be purchased at anytime, meaning your site can grow with extra functionality as your business grows.

View Our Add Ons

All Under One Roof

If you opt to use Property Hive for your website and CRM you’ll have the ability to manage everything in the same place. One login gives you and your staff access to everything you need to manage your day-to-day operations.

Our ‘Property Hive Only Mode’ removes any WordPress distractions leaving you with the things you care about, be it adding a new instruction, matching properties to applicants, or generating a sales memo document.

We’re Experienced in Property Software

With 17 years in the property software industry and thousands of estate agency websites under our belt, quite simply, you can trust us!

Proven Track Record

And, not only do we talk the talk at Property Hive but we can also walk the walk. This is evident in our abundance of 5 star reviews.

We’ve had some amazing opportunities to work with many start ups and to see them grow with the assistance of Property Hive.

Rapid Development

One of the things that we pride ourselves on is the speed at which we develop and can push out new features. We have add ons being released and updated each week and new versions of Property Hive being put out at regular intervals too.

Community Driven and Open Source

Apart from the significant cost saving aspect of using Property Hive, another of our primary USPs is that we want all of our users to be involved in the development and progression of the plugin to make Property Hive better for everyone in the industry.

We do this via a number of methods including public support forums, a public roadmap where you see what’s in development and an open source codebase meaning anyone can contribute new features; just one of the many advantages of using open source software.

If we’ve tickled your fancy, follow the links below to find out more.

For Your Website As Your CRM

The post 7 Reasons why Property Hive is Ideal for Estate Agency Start-ups appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

What’s WordPress?

Let’s go back to basics for a second and look at what WordPress is in case you’ve never heard of it before. In simple terms, WordPress is a free, open-source CMS (Content Management System) that primarily allows you to log in to a secure area and manage the content on your website, though can also be used for other purposes which we’ll be looking at in this blog post.

Why WordPress for Estate Agency CRM Software?

Back to the point of this blog post, we’ve listed 9 reasons below why WordPress is a good foundation for property CRM software and why Property Hive, which runs on WordPress, could be perfect for your estate agency.

Reason One: The Huge Community/Userbase

At the time of writing, WordPress is used on 42.4% of all websites on the entire internet, and this number continues to grow. That’s a huge community, and with community comes blogs, tutorials, guides, the ability to ask questions on forums, and more.

Reason Two: It’s Open Source

We’ve written about being open source in the past so I’m linking to a few of these posts where we discuss the benefits of working with open source software:

Why Property Hive is Open Source, And How It Benefits Us All
Is 2021 The Year To Switch Free Open Source Property Software?

Reason Three: It’s Free

Being open source means it’s completely free. No contract, no sign up fees, no freemium model. With Property Hive being free too you can essentially get a property website and estate agency CRM in place for absolutely nothing. How crazy is that? To think that some estate agency CRM companies charge approximately £100 per user per month, that’s a huge saving.

Reason Four: Have More Control Over Hosting and Backups

Seeing that you host your own WordPress installation you have full control over where it’s hosted, the hosting settings, as well as the backups that are taken.

Reason Five: You Own Your Data and Can Get To It At Anytime

Being self-hosted, the data stored in WordPress is held by you, not mixed with any other agents’ data, and can be accessed at anytime.

Reason Six: Direct Link Between CRM and Website

We mentioned above about how Property Hive can manage both the website and backend CRM. As they’re intertwined into the same system, there’s no delay between editing properties and these changes appearing on the site. There’s also no need for property imports or exports which rely on a third party and have the potential to fail.

Reason Seven: Extendable with plugins

One of WordPress’s main selling points is how extendable it is through the use of plugins, again most of which are completely free. Need improved SEO? There’s a plugin for that. Need to add a contact form? There’s a plugin for that.

The WordPress plugin repository currently has about 60,000 free plugins listed so if you need to add additional features, it’s likely that functionality already exists.

We have also our own range of add ons should you wish to extend the Property Hive-related functionality.

Reason Eight: Property Hive Only Mode

You might be worried about using Property Hive as your main estate agency CRM because you don’t want the other WordPress functionality to get in the way. This is why we recently introduced ‘Property Hive Only Mode’.

With this option enabled it strips out all of the WordPress related items leaving only features you’re interested in to do your day-to-day operations.

Reason Nine: Reduced Learning Curve

One of the advantages of WordPress is how simple it is learn. If you’ve not used WordPress before (and there’s a high chance you have) it’s so intuitive it won’t take long to get to grips with.

There are also thousands of tutorials and videos online to assist should you need it meaning you’ll be up and running in time. No need to pay for expensive training days here.

If you’re looking for new property software hopefully the above reasons will give you food for thought and consider a WordPress and Property Hive based approach.

The post Why WordPress is a Good Foundation for Estate Agency CRM Software appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

The exact email read as follows:

—-

We are reviewing our security protocols for media downloads and will be removing support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on the 1st of August 2021.

This is now available on our test site, if you’d like to test (or if you have any questions or concerns) , please contact the data feed team at adfsupport@rightmove.co.uk.

—-

If you’re unsure on whether this will effect you, you can ask your hosting company to ensure they support TLS 1.2, or as the email states, speak to Rightmove about creating a test account for you, then setup a separate real-time feed in Property Hive linking to this test account.

The post Important Information: Rightmove Removing Support For TLS 1.1 When Downloading Media appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

Below we’ve listed four reasons to use Property Hive for your overseas WordPress real estate website:

List properties in multiple countries

Within the Property Hive settings area you can select which country, or countries, you operate in.

When you come to edit a property you’ll then have the ability to select which of the selected countries the property resides in:

Support for multiple currencies with daily exchange rate updates

Depending on the countries selected you’ll be able to choose the relevant currency for each property:

We’ll default this to the currency of the property’s country.

Should you have properties entered in multiple currencies we’ll take care of that too. When ordering or filtering by price we’ll ensure this is handled accordingly by updating exchange rates behind the scenes automatically each day and storing a ‘base price’ that we then use in searches and when sorting properties. This means, regardless of which currencies are used they’ll always come back at the right time and in the correct order.

Currency conversion functionality for your users

Simply pass a currency in the URL of any page on your website and all prices throughout the site will be displayed in this currency. For example:

https://your-site.com/?currency=EUR

As mentioned above, we update our exchanges rates daily so the converted price shown will always be up-to-date. We’ll also be adding a built-in currency conversion tool in the coming months.

Automatic feeds available to overseas property portals

We have a wide range of add ons available to support sending your property stock automatically to overseas property portals. Some of these include Rightmove, Zoopla, Kyero, A Place In The Sun, The Move Channel and more.

If you’re interested in using our WordPress plugin for your overseas estate agency website you can download Property Hive for free now.

The post 4 Reasons To Use Property Hive For Your Overseas Real Estate Website appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

1: Try and get it right first time

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it’s not possible to know what the future holds, but maybe just take 5 minutes extra to think about how your plugin will be used and how difficult it might be to change something going forward.

Changing data schemas or templates in the future can be tricky, almost to the point where sometimes you can’t make a change without it breaking sites already using the plugin.

An example of this is as follows:

Our Property Import add on allows you to import properties from different third party estate agency CRMs. When it was initially built it only supported a single import, however minutes before releasing it we pulled the plug and spent an extra day updating it to support multiple simultaneous imports. This was one of the best decisions we ever made as we now see multiple imports being used on a daily basis and changing this would’ve been difficult.

Of course it’s possible to write migration scripts when it comes to a change in data structures but these in themselves are an extra development piece that could be avoided with a little extra thought.

2: Cater for every server configuration

Just because you developed your plugin on an Ubuntu server running PHP 7.2 doesn’t mean everyone else is. Differing PHP versions, PHP configurations and installed libraries means further consideration is needed. Our advice surrounding this is as follows:

Ensure error reporting is at maximum whilst developing the plugin and/or regularly consult the server error logs. That way you catch every warning and notice error.

Test the plugin on different server configurations and PHP versions.

If using PHP libraries, don’t assume they’re installed and handle this accordingly. Our Property Import add on makes use of the PHP SimpleXML library to parse XML files which I thought was always enabled by default. Turns out that in rare scenarios hosts actually disable this so we now check for this and display a notification.

3: Remember other plugins will also be installed

Try to make every CSS class, every option name and every function unique to your plugin so that it won’t conflict with another third party plugin should it, by chance, use the same name.

All of our option names and hook names are prefixed with ‘propertyhive_’, classes prefixed with ‘PH_’ and functions prefixed with ‘ph_’ where applicable.

If we were to develop Property Hive again I’d probably go one step further and also make all custom post type and taxonomy names unique as well, prefixing them with ‘ph_’ or similar. We’ve seen it a few times where third party plugins use a shared taxonomy name such as ‘department’ which has caused issues. Thankfully this happens once in a blue moon but nevertheless, it’s one extra support query that could be avoided.

4: Support your plugin

Talking of support, if your plugin gains traction and you want to build a userbase you’re going to need to support it. The first step regarding this is to try and reduce support even coming in in the first place. Some tips regarding this are as follows:

• Add installation and usage instructions to your plugins README file
• Have an FAQs section
• Write documentation
• Build a good, informative UI with tooltips, clear descriptions and embedded links to relevant documentation

Should support queries still be raised, see it as a positive rather than a nuisance. Think about why the support query was raised in the first place; are they proposing a good feature request, or could your documentation be made clearer to prevent that same query coming in again in the future.

If support queries are being made through the ‘support’ tab on the WordPress plugin repository page, by answering queries there it’s in itself building up a knowledgebase for others to reference in the future, plus it shows that you’re responsive and this is a plugin that others interested in downloading it can trust.

5: Your code will be visible

Having worked in large development teams for a number of years prior to Property Hive, writing neat code that can be understood by others is almost engrained into us.

That said, if you haven’t had this opportunity, or you’re writing a plugin by yourself and don’t prioritise code readability, remember that once your plugin is published everyone will be able to see your code. I feel how code is written says a lot about the quality of a product and that, by seeing code thrown together, riddled with typos and no comments, it gives me little confidence in the plugin, nor the will to support it.

Having neat, easy-to-understand code is also important if you want other developers to contribute back to your open-source plugin. If they can’t understand how things work or figure out where things reside, it’s likely they won’t bother contributing.

For aspiring plugin developers out there we hope this helps you to avoid some common pitfalls. One of the things I love about working on Property Hive is the constant learning curve that never ends so hope to share more posts like this in future.

The post 5 Lessons Learnt From Building WordPress Plugins appeared first on Property Hive For WordPress.

These temporary testing sites by TasteWP allow you access for 48 hours for users who don’t login and 7 days for people who are logged in. Setting up a WordPress site for testing couldn’t be easier with their one step approach. At the click of a button you are given a random site URL and login details and away you go.

When you create a new site, TasteWP presents some advanced options which allow you to setup a multisite, choose different versions of both PHP and WordPress and a number of extensions. Once you’ve flown through these options, you can then start using your new WordPress setup in the testing area as if it were a real site.

Developed by a small company called inisev, word on the street is that they are also planning to allow users to call specific URLs, allowing you to load up a WordPress installation with the theme or plugin selected already installed. This could be an absolute game changer in testing out plugins and themes in the future instead of installing them onto a live site.

So if you’ve been thinking about trying out Property Hive for your own estate agency website, or you’re a developer looking to trial it for estate agent customers, give TasteWP a try. Alternatively you can view our own demo here or download our core Property Hive plugin here to install on your own site.

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