Answers to the most commonly asked questions relating to the Property Hive plugin.
Our core Property Hive plugin is free to download and is available here. You can demo it here or setup a quick WordPress testing site at TasteWP. We don’t offer trial periods on any of our premium add ons, although we do offer a 30 day money back guarantee if your purchased premium plugins don’t meet your requirements.
We are often asked which themes work with Property Hive. We’ve put together a post to discuss this in detail which can be found here
The core Property Hive plugin itself, available on the WordPress repository, is completely free. This comes with property search functionality as well as a whole host of other features. This plugin is all open source and available for any developer to contribute to.
We then have a range of add ons available. These are all priced individually and are one-off costs. When you buy an add on it can only be used on a single site and you will stick with the version you buy (read below for information on how to keep updated).
We then have an optional annual license key which you can purchase here. This license key gives you two main benefits: getting priority support and receiving updates to any add ons you’ve purchased. As stated, this is optional. The site and all add ons will operate with or without a license key.
Please note add ons need to be purchased per site (exceptions will be made for staging and development site).
The only page builder we have official support for is Elementor whereby you can build the property details page using the Elementor Pro Theme Builder.
For other page builders, Property Hive and the page builder will likely run fine being installed on the same site, though the pages you build using your chosen page builder are separate from the Property Hive pages and templates. The fact it’s a “page builder”-esque theme makes no difference here.
The Property Hive pages and templates are not normal ‘pages’. The search results page is an ‘archive’ page, much like a blog, and the individual property details pages are ‘single’ pages, much like the individual posts of a blog. As such, you don’t build these pages using any kind of page builder functionality.
The only way in which a page builder might be used in conjunction with Property Hive is when including shortcodes, for example when wanting to include a search form on the homepage, or similar.
We have many sites using Property Hive and page builders (Divi, Enfold, and many more) in the same environment without issue so, although they have no direct impact on each other, they do work side-by-side. To make changes to the Property Hive pages, depending on the layout you’re after and how bespoke it is, it would be a combination of using our free Template Assistant add on, CSS, and for more advanced changes to HTML structure, overriding templates as documented here.
It all depends on how you want your website to look and how bespoke and complex you want the site to be.
If you want everything to come styled out of the box and not get involved in coding and CSS then our free Honeycomb theme might be for you.
Alternatively, if wanting to use your own theme, it’s worth nothing that Property Hive isn’t a theme where everything looks perfect out of the box. This plugin is a platform which offers the functionality and key components. It’s then up to you to lay them out and style them how you want to match the theme you’re using.
In this scenario you’ll undoubtedly need beginner to intermediate level CSS knowledge. Beginner PHP knowledge is also advisable, however our documentation should help get you up to speed with how to customise your website. Again, the more bespoke you want your site, the higher level of coding knowledge you’ll need.
If you have no coding experience, we recommend hiring a WordPress developer, or looking through our Developer Directory to find developers experienced in building sites with Property Hive.
The enquiries will go to the office that the property is assigned to. Offices can be configured under ‘Property Hive > Settings > Offices’.
If no office is assigned to a property (though this scenario shouldn’t be possible) it will go to the primary office.
If an email address hasn’t been found at this point it will fall back to sending the WordPress administrator and sent the enquiry to them.
Should you wish to completely customise where enquiries get sent, we have a WordPress filter available which can be used like so:
add_filter( 'propertyhive_property_enquiry_to', 'custom_enquiry_to_address', 10, 2 );
function custom_enquiry_to_address( $to, $property_id )
{
return 'custom@emailaddress.com';
}
We have been asked this question a lot and the simple answer here, is that no two websites using Property Hive are the same. Therefore it’s impossible for us to know where a sites break points should be as the layout could be completely different from site to site.
Let’s take the search form for example. This could vary between a site having 3 input boxes for their form, or ten. Now, depending on how many input boxes are displayed, the break point for this is going to differ, so it would be difficult for us to make this responsive in a way that it would meet everyone’s needs.
The same goes for our default templates. Because each website is unique and different, we felt it best to leave this up to the developers creating the site so that the end result is completely bespoke to your website.
Note that if you’re using our free Honeycomb theme then all styling and responsiveness is included out-of-the-box for you.
A common question we get asked is regarding why, after setting up Property Hive and adding properties, they don’t show on the page that’s been assigned as the ‘Search Results’ page.
Most commonly the page will read ‘Showing the single result‘, or similar, but the properties, nor the search form will show.
The most common solution/causes for this are as follows:
1. Try re-saving permalinks
Sometimes when activating and deactivating plugins, WordPress can get confused regarding which templates and URL’s to use. A simple solution to rectify this is to go to ‘Settings > Permalinks‘ and just hit ‘Update‘.
2. A theme conflict
The other cause for this is that there is a conflict with the theme being used. The default Property Hive templates often use a CSS class called ‘clear’. We’ve seen in the past that themes also use this class but the class in theme actually hides the elements, hence why you’re not seeing anything. To get around this you either need to remove the ‘clear’ class from the theme, or override the Property Hive templates to not use this class in the following template files:
– global/search-form
– search/loop-start.php
– content-property.php
– content-property-featured.php
– content-property-recent.php
Yes. Property Hive will function on a multisite setup. We use as much of the core WordPress functionality as possible (custom post types, taxonomies etc) which not only results in it working by default without issue, but also ensures it’s more future-proof.
Property Hive has been built with translation in mind. Everywhere that text has been output we’ve tried to use the in-built WordPress functions that allow the translation. For example:
__( 'Text here', 'propertyhive' )
As such, technically Property Hive does support multi-language. At the time of writing however we haven’t tested additional languages. This is not because we don’t want to support other languages, but more that it hasn’t been requested.
We are going to be looking at using the https://translate.wordpress.org/ service and need to do some more investigation into this and decide on a plan of attack before announcing official multi-language support.
As Property Hive is open source, if you’re interested in looking into this for your own benefit it is possible for you to contribute and will be greatly received by the rest of the community.
Alternatively, you can sign up to our mailing list in the footer of our website and you’ll be notified when multi-language is supported.
