Lincoln Loop

Gondola for Real Estate Launch

I’m pleased to announce that Gondola for Real Estate, our GeoDjango-backed real estate CMS is publicly accepting new customers. A couple weeks ago, we quietly re-launched gondolacms.com with some details about the platform and what it has to offer, as well as some sites that have been built on it over the last few months.

History

A couple of years ago, we were building websites for some local real estate agents and realized that what they wanted couldn’t be shoehorned into the popular CMS frameworks available at the time. Somewhat reluctantly, we set out to reinvent a CMS that met their needs written in Django. Eventually, the client-specific bits were extracted and Gondola was created. It has been under the radar for the last few months while we tweaked the system with a small group of early adopters and it is to the point now where we’re ready to push it out to the world.

Yet Another CMS… Really!?

We’re well aware of the myriad of content management systems out there and typically avoid the Not Invented Here syndrome, but our needs were a bit unique. As a result, we have a few features you simply won’t find in the other systems:

• It is Geo-enabled. Geotag anything on your site, and you can automatically display lists of things nearby. This is a killer feature, not only for real estate, but for lots of other uses as well.
• Gondola for Real Estate has a fully-integrated property listing system built-in. Gondola handles MLS, IDX, RETS, XML and the other nasty acronyms for you and presents it in a nice clean format that is easy to work with.
• Web designers/developers get WebDAV access to all the templates and media for the site. As developers ourselves, having to edit these in a web interface or upload them after every change would be a deal breaker. Mount the folder on your computer and use the tools you’re comfortable with.
• Every site includes a development sandbox where code changes can be tested before sending to a live site. The site includes all the live data, so users can see exactly what it will look like before committing it to the live production site.

For web designers, Gondola for Real Estate really fills a void in the market. It makes the task of building awesome real estate websites a painless endeavor.

Check it Out

Want to learn more? Visit gondolacms.com and check out some of the sites already using Gondola. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email us at info@gondolacms.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Comments

• May 24, 2010 at 10:09 p.m. #
  MyListingFeedback added:

  Very cool! I didn’t see anything on the site regarding the RETS sync. How do you handle this across the different RETS servers?

• May 25, 2010 at 8:32 a.m. #
  Peter Baumgartner piped up:

  Thanks @MyListingFeedback!

  RETS synchronization is all handled behind the scenes. We support a number of RETS implementations already and update them nightly for all the sites. In the event somebody comes to us with a RETS server we have not worked with, we setup Gondola to work with it.

• May 25, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. #
  memo mentioned:

  Seems quite nice to have a cms working with geodjango.

• June 14, 2010 at 5:26 p.m. #
  Troy Assaly piped up:

  Sounds interesting… how much does it cost?

Got something to say?

Name
Email
Website
Comment