Their new Delaware Real Estate section is powered by our Drupal stack utilizing a custom in-house RETS module. Previous systems would receive listings once a day through a bulk FTP push from Offutt. Using RETS, Wilgus Associates can receive on-demand updates and data every hour.

This allows for the data to be arranged, mapped, sorted and listed in thousands of ways backed up by hourly data integrity functions to ensure the most up to date information, not to mention the worlds most flexible CMS to manage content with Drupal.

The new site also makes use of extensive search engine optimization work to help Wilgus rank better amongst their competiton. It also utilizes social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to help spread the word and allow users to share/bookmark listings in their respective services.

What is RETS?

The Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) facilitates data transfer between partners in the real estate industry. Creating and improving RETS is a collaborative effort to simplify moving real estate information from system to system and simplify solution development efforts. As RETS usage matures and expands, MLS with geographic overlaps can create data-sharing policies that provide their members a single point of entry to search multiple MLS data sets.

Interested in RETS?

If you’re a broker or REALTOR, using RETS technology is the fastest way to get listings up and running on your website. Our RETS system for Drupal was built with flexibility, speed, marketing, and conversions in mind allowing us to quickly and effectively deploy it in no time.

Contact Inclind today at 302-856-2802 or email us at info@inclind.com for a free consultation on how your Delaware real estate website could benefit by using RETS.

About Wilgus Associates

The growth story of Wilgus Associates can be traced back to its origins as a staff of one in a one room insurance office located on the boardwalk in the Bethany Beach Bowling Ally. Since that humble and simple beginning, Wilgus Associates has grown to include three offices in Sussex County that offer a wide array of real estate and insurance services and now employs a staff of over fifty people.

Visit the Wilgus Associates website >>

Washingtons Green Grocer is the brainchild of John (Zeke) Zechiel and his wife Lisa. After identifying the need for better produce and deliverables versus store bought goods, John and Lisa planted the seeds for Washingtons Green Grocer in 1994. Every week, Washingtons Green Grocer provides customers with tentative lists of fruits and vegetables that will be available, and each customer can pick and choose what they would like delivered (yep, home delivery!) for that week through their online account.

Providing unmatched service and 100% dedication to custom satisfaction, Washingtons Green Grocer has been wildly popular and has exploded in the DC metro area. They currently serve all of Washington DC and the surrounding suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia from Severna Park to Arlington and all points in between north and south.

How does it work?

Every week, Washingtons Green Grocer selects 12 to 14 different fruits and vegetables and delivers them to your doorstep. On Friday’s, they email customers a tentative list for the next weeks delivery. If there is anything on the list you don’t want, you can log into your account and customize your box. For example, you can choose to receive only 7 items instead of the full box, or substitute items for other items. Each customer can choose exactly what they want and get it without fail every single week. You can also set custom schedules for delivery, such as every other week, or once a month, or schedule around vacation time. It’s all up to the customer!

Application

Such business growth commands the necessity of a powerful web application to tie all the logic together and keep things running smoothly. After getting tired of the shortcomings of their previous system, Zeke contacted us and we started talking about a full redesign of the front end and a re-architecting of the back end. After planning and mind-mapping the application to the last detail, Inclind began work on the project early in the summer of this year.

Their initial website was built on a rigid and inflexible Coldfusion system. The first order of business was getting all the existing data out and into the new system and giving it structure to make it easy to work with. As with all our sites, we begin with a base install of Drupal 6 to build from. Drupal is the best CMF (content management framework) available right now. Other packages that are simply CMS (content management systems- Plone, Wordpress, Joomla) are not as adaptable and flexible as Drupal.

To handle the business end of things, Ubercart takes care of the day to day transactions for customers. There are over 5,000 active customers in the system. To make it as easy as possible to get started, we ask for your basic information up front and allow you to pick your items for delivery. After your account is created, a staff member at Washington’s Green Grocer selects the most appropriate truck route for you and you will begin receiving deliverables on the next scheduled day.

At this point, a customer can login at any time and adjust their delivery schedule, items for delivery, or halt deliveries. Customers can also browse recipes on the site and submit their own. Washington’s Green Grocer promotes healthy eating habits and you will find plenty of recipes on their website for that.

Backend

Along with the new visuals and customer functionality, we needed to build and provide lots of cool administrative stuff into the backend for easy management of customers, data, and content.

We also needed to be able to actively map delivery truck routes through Google Maps on demand and be able to filter them in a variety of ways. This helps Washingtons Green Grocer visually assess their delivery routes, their customers, and orders. We also also extended on that to provide filtering tools to narrow it down further to specific routes, specific clients, specific orders or orders with specific kinds of products.

Washingtons Green Grocer staff also have a variety of reporting tools at their disposal for viewing customer trends, requests, future forecasting, and production reports.

Check out Washingtons Green Grocer today!

Leif has a background in photography, web design, SEO, project/client management, and social media with a likeable personality to boot. He’s very active with social media (and we don’t mind that!) such as Facebook and Twitter. He’s also active in the community with his photography.

Welcome Leif!

Earlier this month, the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America relaunched their website, Whitehouse.gov, using Drupal. This week three members of the White House new media team presented at the Washington, DC Drupal users group. New media director Macon Phillips, deputy director of technology David Cole, and creative director Nik Lo Bue talked about their use of Drupal.

Watch the screencast here: http://vimeo.com/7669508

Alutech United provides the most complete line of products and services to help you best protect your home from the elements. For over 16 years Alutech United has helped their dealers protect thousands of homeowners with existing homes, vacation homes or even their new dream homes with only the very best in storm shutter protection.

Last week, Inclind launched their website built on our customized Drupal package. This site was the first site to receive our new Billboard module, and features a unique theme switcher based on click path tracked in your session cookie. We worked with Joe very closely to meet and exceed his needs for Alutech United.

Check out Alutech United today for a rich and informative website on storm shutters and home protection.

From the award announcement,

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

This is the highest award that Drupal was eligible for in 2009. Drupal previously won for Best Overall CMS in 2007 and 2008 has been placed in the Hall of Fame. The winners of the Hall of Fame Drupal awards for best Drupal theme and best Drupal contributed module will be awarded Thursday, November 12th, 2009. The themes and modules nominated were selected both for the most used and for a diverse set of nominees.

We use Drupal exclusively for building customized, scalable high end web applications. It’s no surprise developers, designers and users keep voting Drupal as Best CMS for years in a row. There is nothing you cannot do with Drupal. Being a CMF (content management framework), it is not pigeonholed into any one particular niche like Wordpress (strictly blogging applications).

What has Inclind done with Drupal?

• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics SOP System into Ubercart for product importing and inventory management
• Integration with Ubercart and Drupal into UPS Worldship for rock solid quoting
• Integration with UPS Worldship for automatic label printing for commerce orders
• Integration with Amazon S3 services for synced failsafe CDN (Content Distribution Network) support
• Integration with Windows LDAP Protocol support
• Integration with Invision Power Board Forum for external authentication of users through Drupal
• Integrated Ubercart as a management application of customers with interval based shipping orders (drop shipment / bulk ordering)
• Built routing algorithms to track and route best delivery methods for truck drivers on to Google Maps
• Built over 100 custom modules to meet the needs of individual clients
• … with more to come

Who else uses Drupal? Check it out!

• AOL
• The White House
• Yahoo
• IBM
• Bob Dylan
• The Onion
• CNN
• Metallica
• United Nations
• jQuery
• Sony BMG
• Michael Jackson
• Ozzy Osbourne
• EA Games
• Star Trek Online
• Mastodon
• Warner Bros
• CKY
• MTV
• MTV2
• SpreadFirefox
• SpreadThunderbird
• Computer World

A few days ago, I took 10 seconds to fire off a question to John Carmack of iD Software, who basically INVENTED modern gaming as we know it, over Twitter. This guy is solely responsible for gaming today. He created Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake (not to mention causing me to log hours and hours of gametime) and spawned countless games in their wake like Half-Life.

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2009/11/05/john-carmack-on-doom-classic-development-fan-questions/

John Carmack, the legendary godfather of gaming answered my question from Twitter. I guess I ought to put Doom on my iPhone now, or at least die happy.

I’ve been using Twitter to connect with industry leaders, celebrities, and everyday people. If you’d like to know how you can utilize Twitter to build your business or online persona, we’d be happy to train you or your staff on Twitter, CoTweet, TweetDeck or a host of other Twitter solutions. Just give us a call at 302-856-2802, or tweet us @inclindinc.

NetApplications tracks and monitors tons of information on the internet and you are free to use the information in your own reports. For example, here is the month of October 2009: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2. That’s a lot of browsers! Older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (common with Win2k-XP SP1) and Internet Explorer 5 (pre 2k) are hanging in there.

But how do such old browsers rear their heads a decade or more after their release when newer versions exist? How does Internet Explorer 6 persist?

On the one hand, you have a majority of people who buy a computer and never update it, either the software or the hardware. In such case, these people typically are ‘light’ users, where they generally check email and the news and not much else. Now that computers are available practically everywhere, including Walmart, many of these people will find it harder and harder to not get a new system. They are cheaper, faster, and more affordable than ever before. Those systems will be preloaded with Windows 7, OSX 10.6, or Linux and the newest browser available at the time of manufacturing. ‘Power users’ may not have the latest hardware, but they always have the latest software and keep their current system up to date with operating system updates. Most of them will be running Internet Explorer 7, or the more savvy will have Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

On the other hand, you have lots of public service offices like libraries, police departments, public schools and government offices. These institutions have IT departments, and those departments have budgets. A lot of custom software developed in the late 90s and early 2000s (even some still) were tailored directly for Internet Explorer 6. A lot of public school systems cannot afford to upgrade, and upgrading large companies with thousands of people may break the custom software that was developed in IE6 (which would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars in a rather tight economy). Nine times out of ten, desktop upgrades are voted down unless the situation is pretty dire, and also the current operating system needs to have had at least one service pack out. Company-wide upgrades to software will typically require some level of training as well, which means more time, and more money.

In that perspective, even though 23% of all internet users are using Internet Explorer 6, you could probably assume that half of them are institutions that cannot control their desktop environment (as mentioned in the previous paragraph). From there, you could do some more research and analyze data for the website you are working on and determine what kind of visitors they have. Typically we’ve seen numbers between 3-7%.

Well, now what?

The big debate on the internet now is how to handle users who continue to use outdated browsers. Do we leave them in the dust, unable to browse a website? Do we add in conditional code to handle specific older browsers so they have optimal experience? Should a pop up or page be loaded requesting them to get a new browser to view the site? The answer to that is not so simple. The issue is too big for any one developer or designer to make on their own, as most of us are not making sites for our own use, but rather we make them for clients. It’s bad business sense to say oh, you 10% of clients with Internet Explorer 6, you can’t use my site anymore. That could mean a few thousand dollars or more in lost sales, lost business, lost leads. Sure, fine tuning CSS and HTML or proper browser testing in general may feel tedious, but a few extra hours of work is a small price to pay to make clients as successful as they can be.

At least on the upside, it’s trending downward.

What are billboards (banners, header images, et al) you ask? Billboards are the large images you see on various websites that cover the header area. They typically contain marketing statements and imagery relevant to the websites purpose or page content.

Here are is one of my favorite examples:

Visit Southern Delaware Tourism Website

See that set of images just above the content, fading in and out? That is a billboard. With this module, you can create those in a matter of seconds.

After some brainstorming between Shaun and myself, we set out to create something simple, as simple as creating a Page node, without all the aforementioned hassle. After a week of coding, testing, testing and testing, we achieved just that. Now all you have to do is say, I want to create a Billboard, drop in your images (with a cool AJAX in-place uploader, you don’t even have to leave the page), and tell it what pages to display on and you’re done! It couldn’t be any simpler. You also have additional options available to you such as changing how the images display (random image, or fade in/out between images), setting ALT and Title tags for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and select a resize option to size the billboard to (which is controlled and hooked into ImageCache!). Oh, on top of all of that, it’s all output via a single block. That’s right, you can have 100 billboards and just one block. Once you place it in the region, depending on your site theme, it’s ready to go. In the future you will be able to add blocks so you can have a billboard in the header, and also the footer or sidebar if you wish.

We have been taking feedback from our clients over the months, taking notes during training meetings, and analyzing massive amounts of performance data from our servers. It’s been pretty quiet in the blog, Facebook and our Twitter and it’s because we’ve been very hard at work. Over the last few weeks Inclind has been working at refining what we do in order to better serve, better train, and better our clients online presence. The Billboard module is just the tip of the iceberg, a precursor to the ultra-streamlined CMS package we have been putting together. There is so much going on, I couldn’t even begin to write up what will be coming in the next few months.

We’re here to serve you, to help you get things done faster, and make it so you don’t need a PHd to manage your site.

If you have any questions regarding Billboards, Drupal, our refined CMS package or need help managing your content, we are here to help. Give us a call at 302-856-2802, send us a tweet @inclindinc, or stop by our office.

A lot of businesses are using Twitter to connect with clients in new ways every single day. If you’d like to know more, we’d be happy to train you or your staff on how to market your company through Twitter, CoTweet, TweetDeck and a host of other Twitter solutions. Just give us a call at 302-856-2802, or tweet us @inclindinc.

About Twitter:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. Source: Wikipedia