Lviv Apartments

Overview

Lviv Apartments agency has been running its business for 2 years before they addressed Quintagroup with the request to take up their new online project.

Business Need

Lviv Apartments needed an appropriate solution to support all aspects of online Real Estate Management. Lviv Apartments agency chose Plone CMS Plone as a fine base for their new website, since Plone made it possible to satisfy all company requests.

• Real estate solution, allowing easy and effortless management of apartment objects. 
• Possibility to quickly browse apartments photos without extra unnecessary page reloads.
• Lviv Apartments was supposed to be a multilingual (including 5 languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English, German and Polish) website, having all its content easily manageable.

The Project

Quintagroup Delivered

• Plone-based Real Estate Content Management Solution
• Plone Theme
• Plone development
• Technical support
• Hosting

Real Estate Content Management Solution

Suggested Plone Real Estate Content Management Solution is a flexible product that can suit number of needs. It is a customizable structure that can be easily set to satisfy clients' demands. 

Property Management

Since Lviv Apartments company offers apartments for short-term rent, company web-site includes description of available apartments, their features, photos, price, etc. To enable apartment pages represent apartment information in the most presentable manner, new translatable easy-editable Plone content type was developed called apartment info. 

Apartment Info objects have references to photos attached. Photos of apartment are displayed on apartment page: one of them is displayed in its original size, while others are represented by thumbnails. A click on a thumbnail changes the main photo to the one you selected. Ajax technology was used here to enable convenient photo browsing on one page without loading new page for every photo.

Rental Listing

Apartments can be viewed in listings, according to the number of rooms in them. To represent informative apartments listing, with apartment small images, rent price, address and some apartment features, special listing_apartment view was developed. Such an informative apartment listing can help site visitors find necessary apartment quicker, not spending time on opening those apartment pages they are not interested in.

Contact Forms

Every apartment contains contact phone number. Members can also make use of online contact forms. Contact / Book Apartments forms were created with PloneFormGen Plone product, with addition of new captcha field developed by Quintagroup (Plone Captcha Field product) to validate human input.

Multilingualism

Lviv Apartment is a multilingual Plone-based website. All site content is available in 5 languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, English and German. Visitors can select the desirable language and browse site content in this language. Each site page has connection with pages in other languages. Site multilingualism was achieved with the help of LinguaPlone product.

All the pages, Navigation menu, breadcrumbs, tabs and portlets were translated into 5 different languages to help site visitors navigate on site in a desired language. Different site tabs appear for different languages.

Language-related logics was used to make certain number of tabs be displayed for every language. So, every language has its own set of tabs appear that leads to site sections in a selected language. Tabs were assigned manually for every language and it was Plone Tabs product that enabled such tabs flexibility. All site tabs were created in Portal Tabs Configuration area, each possessing the corresponding condition (expression) that checks whether tab will or will not appear. 

Site Theme

• Brio Skin top default images were replaced by photos of Lviv. 
• Since Brio Skin allows having unique background pictures for different folders, so this feature was actively used and many different photos of Lviv were used for different site folders.
• Brio Skin logo that is displayed on site top left area was customized. Moreover, different variants of logo is used for different languages. Logo background color was also changed and 2 variants of background color is used - blue and brown. 
• Brio Skin black background color and portlets header color was also changed.

Conclusion

Plone suited Lviv Apartment project perfectly since system's ease-of-use, suggested Real Estate solution, and rich multilingual features.