The problem
Immobiliare 360 is an estate agency in Calabria, in southern Italy. It needed its own site to publish listings for sale and for rent, turn visitors into enquiries, and offer more than a list of houses: valuations, mortgage advice and a magazine about the property market.
What I built
I wrote a custom PHP and MySQL portal with its own admin panel, plus a WordPress magazine next to it.
- Property search — filter by sale or rent, municipality, category (residential, commercial, new builds), type, floor area and price range. Municipalities come from a list of 8,162 Italian towns with province and postcode.
- Clickable map of Calabria — each of the 5 provinces opens its own listings, a quick way in for people who think by area.
- Listing pages — Google Maps location, YouTube video, watermarked photos, print view, send-to-a-friend by email and a price-on-request option.
- Accounts and favourites — visitors register, log in, recover their password and keep a list of saved properties.
- Lead forms — requests for a valuation, mortgage advice, a property search brief, job applications and general contact, each with its own HTML email notification.
- Admin panel — listings, featured properties, home slider, users, partners and pages with their own SEO title, description and robots settings.
- Magazine — a WordPress magazine on a subdomain; the latest article also appears in the main site’s sidebar.
Built with
PHP, MySQL, jQuery, Jssor slider, Colorbox, Google Maps API, Facebook Open Graph and AddThis, with clean URLs through Apache rewrite rules. Magazine: WordPress with the Senna theme.
Why it was done this way
Listings and articles have different needs. Listings need structured fields and custom search; articles need a comfortable editor. So the listings live in the custom system and the magazine runs on WordPress. The main site reads the newest post straight from the magazine’s database, so the two stay linked with no manual copying.
