In the past, agents coming from other IDX companies, or simply had a lead they wanted to add to their IDX website, would create a lead from the admin lead area and our system would send the lead an email invitation which they would be required to accept and complete their registration.

As stricter CAN-SPAM (US law) and CASL (Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation) began to roll out over the past few years, it ensured that all leads added to your account gave their explicit permission to receive messages. In order to make the platform more flexible to our customers, instead of the platform rigidly ensuring 100% compliance, this responsibility is now on our customers as is the current industry standard. You still have to make sure you have permission to send your leads and clients messages, but this new change allows you to more easily work with your clients.

In the past with our opt-in requirement, if your lead did not accept this invitation, they could be stuck in limbo and unable to receive recommended searches!

We understood this was a huge hindrance and many of our customers, old and new, had very strong feelings about this feature.

On March 26th, we removed the requirement for leads to accept the invitation when created from the admin!

From today onwards, you are able to create a lead via the "create a lead" button in the lead dashboard and the lead's email address will be automatically registered to your IDX website! This means you can set them up on searches immediately.

When a lead is added, they will instead receive the lead sign-up welcome email, which you can tailor to your liking under Settings > Email in your agent admin.

This is the first in many major updates for Showcase IDX over the next few months and a further step in helping you scale your business.

Note that this updated feature will apply to leads added after March 26th only.

We recommend that leads who are created from the admin simply request a password reset on your IDX website to access their accounts.

Product Updates

Main Search Bar Improvements

• The search bar now waits for 3 characters of "query input" before generating suggestions for location autocomplete.
• Fixed a bug in which the moment the 3rd character was entered, incorrect autocomplete suggestions would be displayed. Often this looked like we were making ridiculous city suggestions to the query entered (ie, you'd type Atlanta but see "Houston, TX" as the first suggestion).
• Reduced the amount of data loaded for the search bar, resulting in faster loading times.

These benefits work on the main search app and the "search bar" widget.

Miscellaneous

• Improved email deliverability to yahoo.com email addresses.
• We have improved the normalization of MLS going into our search infrastructure to improve matching, particularly around case-sensitivity and multi-term searches (like Subdivision: Oaks of Lawndale).

We've also launched our new public roadmap and product feedback platform -- come visit us at http://ideas.showcaseidx.com

MLS/IDX Data Feed Improvements

New Markets

• Launched the CREA data feed (all of Canada except Manitoba and a few MLS's that do not share data to CREA).

Updated Data Feeds

• Upgraded Heartland data feed to MLSGrid.
• Upgraded the Indian River MLS feed to Trestle. Previously this was a Planet Realtor FTP feed, so this is a huge upgrade!
• Upgraded MLSCO
• Upgraded MLSLI to OneKey
• Upgraded WestPenn to Trestle
• Upgraded MRED to MLSGRID
• Upgraded our HAR/HRIS relationship so that brokers/agents no longer need to pay setup or annual fees to HAR/HRIS

Miscellaneous

• Our MLS Coverage is now searchable! This should make it much easier for customers to find out if we support the MLS feed in their areas of interest. You can search by MLS or Association name or acronym, top cities, and more.
• We've internally added a ton of tracking metrics which allows us to better understand if we have all of the listing data, if it has pictures, and how up-to-date it is across our infrastructure. These improvements make it easier for us to detect if a feed is not performing to our standards and be more proactive about addressing data feed issues. This work helped us identify and fix several significant issues affecting a handful of MLS's.
• We've re-worked our property type normalization to ensure a consistent experience. Here is the official list of all property types where we normalize into:

Single Family Home
Adult Community
Condo
Timeshare
Co-Op
Townhouse
Multi-Family
Mobile Home
Land
Villa
Acreage & Farm
Commercial
Business Opportunity
Boat Slips and Docks
Farm
Houseboat
Other
Parking Space

• Made dozens of minor data mapping improvements. This improves our standardized searches across MLS's and improves data accuracy.
• MLSGrid data feeds are now searchable by their true MLS#. MLSGrid adds a prefix to the MLS #'s that they manage, and that meant that users searching by MLS# in those markets weren't finding their listings.
• Improved how we organize MLS data feed inventory in our system so that we can add new data feeds more easily in the future.
• Added Open Houses to our West Penn feed

Systems Infrastructure Improvements

• Launched our new status page to alert all customers of planned maintenance, any incidents with our servers/platform/infrastructure, and any incidents related to third-party services (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).
• Completed an upgrade of our ElasticSearch back-end cluster, we are now much more scalable. The number of searches performed by visitors to websites of Showcase IDX customers has been growing substantially. This upgrade allows us to continue to support your growth.
• Upgraded some internal microservices networking infrastructure, dramatically reducing latency between our internal systems and improving the reliability and speed of all of our applications.

Back in the day, there were just bathrooms. Then, along came half bathrooms. And Jack & Jill Bathrooms. That wasn't enough, so we invented three-quarter bathrooms… and one-quarter bathrooms. That's a lot of bathrooms! And amazingly, they don't quite always have the same definition around the country (or world).

So, to simplify things, we have cleaned up the way we calculate bathrooms in our search app.

In general, people care mostly about how many bathrooms there are in total. So, this is how we now summarize listings on the list view in the app:

On the listing detail page, we have the space to clarify the nature of all of these bathrooms, so we separate out full and partial baths.

Beyond that, the variation across MLS's and even among how different agents in the same MLS list bathrooms starts to get complex, and so the best place at this time to understand that information is from the property description and the photos.

As we went through this process, there were some layout implications. You can see that to make everything look nice we slightly re-arranged how we display bedrooms / bathrooms and some other headline data like "Days Online", "New Listing", etc.

We think this is a huge step forward in clearly presenting this complex piece of data in a simple & standard way.

Enjoy!

3.1.7

• Fixed a bug in the way we interoperate with Jetpack and Yoast plugins to ensure that our custom SEO content & social sharing (Facebook and Twitter) is used for listing pages.

3.1.6

• Updates to [showcaseidx_search] shortcode -- now if you hide all items other than the "location", the form will auto-submit as soon as a location is selected. Great for making a clean home page search form!

• Updates to [showcaseidx_nav] shortcode -- now you can control which items are visible! Now it's possible to have a simple "Sign In / Sign Up" link in your top-nav without pulling in all of the Showcase IDX navigation.

We've done a deep analysis on how Open House data is processed and shown throughout our system and made it much more robust.

Improvements

• Open houses now display the Day of Week that they occur on.
• We now display the time and time zone that an open house occurs in based on the browser's local time zone. This helps visitors understand exactly when the open house is actually occurring regardless of their location relative to the open house.
• "Upcoming Open House" searches now show open houses through the end of the day, rather than cutting off at the current time on a future day.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the Hawaii MLS open house data was not tagged with the proper time zone.
• Fixed bug where open houses would disappear from an "Upcoming Open Houses" search once they began. Now Open Houses are returned in these searches until they have ended.
• Fixed a bug where open houses in different time zones were not working properly. This would cause open houses to disappear from our platform a few hours before they should have. This bug did not affect open houses in Eastern Time Zone. However, the further west the open house was located (relative to Eastern Time), the earlier it would disappear; this was most significant for users in Hawaii.

We think this should dramatically clean up all of the outstanding issues with our open house display system. If you are still experiencing any issues with this part of the system, please let us know.

We have just released and fixed an incompatibility bug that was affecting users of v3.1.4 that were running their Wordpress on platforms using Automattic's Advanced Post Cache. This includes anyone running their site on Wordpress.com, whose sites use this caching mechanism even though the plugin doesn't appear in the WP Plugins area; Advanced Post Cache seems just built-in to the platform.

The way this incompatibility presented was that the http://mysite.com/properties page [or whatever you set the Showcase IDX url to] would not show the property search application; instead it would typically just show the home page content.

Showcase IDX Wordpress Plugin v3.1.5 fixes this incompatibility with Advanced Post Cache. Simply update your plugin (which is now typically automatic thanks to recent Wordpress core update) and your site should be back to fully-functional immediately!

We've updated the Showcase IDX Wordpress plugin (v3.1.4) which is now officially tested with Wordpress 5.5+.

v3.1.4 also contains a fix that improves compatibility with the way Wordpress 5.4 / 5.5 now handles URL routing. The Showcase IDX plugin would sometimes not properly render, or would issue HTTP/404 (not found) when using Permalink Custom Structures. This has been fixed!

We've recently made some improvements to our geocoding infrastructure to ensure as many listings as possible are properly geocoded.

The MLS database is a noisy place, and has its share of errors relating to listing locations. Typos, bad data, and other things happen.

We have done a full audit of our infrastructure and made a ton of little fixes that will result in great improvements in our search app:

• Far fewer listings with no map location
• More listings shown on the map and searchable by map/polygon
• No more listings that display in the middle of the ocean
• Better map "positioning" when displaying results on map
• Listings in "new" parts of town will map correctly in our system soon after their locations are known to Google

As of today, we have over 1.5 million listings searchable and 99.9% of them are geocoded.

Keeping it going

We've also added a great deal of internal infrastructure to monitor our geocoding coverage so that we can ensure that we keep up these high levels of excellence in our listing data.

We know how important page speed is to our customers, especially those who are investing their time and energy into creating great UX and SEO performance on their websites. With page speed being factored in more & more to SEO performance, we know how important this is to your marketing & traffic-generation efforts.

About 6 months ago, we released support for lazy-loading WP plugins which allowed customers to use lazy-loading plugins on their WP sites. However, the actual thumbnail listing images on our search results page were not lazy loaded.

A New Standard

There is now a widely-supported internet standard for lazy-loading images natively in the browser. It works in all modern Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera browsers; Safari support is coming soon. Support for native lazy-loading is 78% of desktop users and 68% of mobile, and rising every day. See all the details here.

We are now using loading="lazy" for all search results images. Since our default search results page loads 100 listings, lazy-loading has a huge impact, reducing the number of requests by 80-90 and the page weight by 2-4 MB.

Please note that are are still including the skip-lazy attributes on our images so that WP lazy-load plugins do not affect our IDX content.

Before

Images represent 103 of the images requested on the page load, with images weighing in at 2.7MB out of 4MB total page weight.

After

Now, only 31 images are loaded (a reduction of 72 requests!) and there and images are now just 615kB of 2.1MB total page weight (a reduction of 1.9MB transferred).

There is nothing you need to do to take advantage of the new lazy loading; it has been automatically enabled on all sites!

We have a new version (3.1) of the Showcase IDX Wordpress plugin available today as a Beta version.

The major theme of this update is better plugin compatibility. We have isolated a core cause of conflicts between our code and other plugins and found a way to fix it.

What this means in practice is that you should experience far fewer issues with part of the Showcase IDX experience not working properly. This is one of those fixes that is a bit anti-climactic, in that you'll simply have fewer technical issues, but won't really even notice when it's doing its thing :)

If you have had compatibility issues with our plugin in the past, we encourage you to try this version today. You are also encouraged to try using plugins you might have disabled in the past due to advice from our support team.

Main Plugin Incompatibilities Addressed

The main types of plugins that cause issues with Showcase IDX are ones that edit the page content or try to optimize loading of scripts and css:

• Optimizer plugins
• Caching plugins
• Image Lazy-Loading plugins

Installing the beta version

1. On the Showcase IDX plugin page within your WordPress Admin (left sidebar WP dashboard navigation), deactivate the plugin.

2. Deactivate Showcase IDX on the plugins page.

3. Delete the old version of Showcase IDX.

3. Click ADD NEW at the top of the plugins page and on the next page, there will be an Upload Plugin option in the same area.

4. Download the plugin here and then upload the plugin to Wordpress via the Upload Plugin option. Once uploaded, click Install Now.

5. Click Activate Plugin. You will be prompted to log in to your Showcase IDX account (if you aren't already) and then choose the website available for activation.

6. Configure the default search URL (match it to what you had it set to previously)

7. Clear all your existing caches from caching plugins, optimization plugins, server caches, browser caches… all the caches.

8. Test away! ​​

Technical Details

Previous versions of the plugin would include the HTML and Javascript needed to run Showcase IDX directly in the web page where the shortcode was placed. This presented compatibility problems since other plugins would see this content as "page content" and run their normal plugin magic on it. This is where the problem happened, as these plugins were editing our Javascript code!

We now process HTML and Javascript for shortcodes via separate paths in Wordpress. Other plugins no longer see our Javascript in the page content, and thus they are no longer editing and breaking our code.