About the Site
EstateSalesUS.com is a niche site dedicated to finding and listing estate sales and the companies that manage them. While this is not a new idea we wanted to make the process easier and more affordable for those involved. We believe in the power of free. At EstateSalesUS.com we will always offer single listings for no charge. For those Do It Yourself individuals we want to do everything we can to help them promote their sales in a way that helps them but does not put a financial strain on their budget. Professionals who regularly have more than one sale listing at a time we have advanced options to make it easier for them to manage all their sales under one account. Through initial research we have found that many companies have shown interest and plan on joining in our efforts in the coming months to make EstateSalesUS a leading site online. While Estate Sales are the primary category of sales we will offer, we expect to have listings for garage sales, yard sales, liquidation sales, and even auctions. Visit EstateSalesUS.com for a local affordable place to promote your sale for FREE.
Paypal Subscriptions
http://estatesalesus.com/subscribe
We wanted to have paid subscriptions options without all the upfront costs. While we could use ubercart's recurring billing options, we have decided to launch initially with Paypal subscriptions and later transition to Authorize's ARB subscriptions when we have enough traffic and subscriptions to justify the added cost.
Using LM paypal and Quota by Role, we have easily launched a low-cost, easy to use and secure subscription content system. LM Paypal allows you to grant/remove roles based on a paid Paypal subscription. Quota by Role allows us to limit how much content a user can add, based on their role. Our FREE subscribers can submit 1 free sales listing a month, while paid subscribers can submit 5 listings a month or unlimited for the high level subscriber.
Email Alert
We wanted to have a simple alert system for bargain hunters to subscribe to an area and get updates when a new sale is added to that area. We were able to do that using a little custom code.
Basically all I needed was to use the _nodeapi() hook and drupal_mail() function and _mail() hook. Using the _nodeapi() hook we track when a new listing is published and that's when we look through our list of subscribers (variable_get/set make an easy databae) and email each one in real time to notify them of the new listing. The custom module is less than 200 lines of code.
Remote Data
http://estatesalesus.com/sales/results?region=sf
We wanted a way to have content from day 1 to give us time to build our database of free and paid for listings. By partnering with Oodle.com, we were able to pull sales listings from Oodle. Using PHP 5's simple XML and curl, this was a pretty easy task.
Moderating Content
Using the modr8 module we can moderate new content coming in from users to try to prevent spam. We also use a simple trigger+action to notify administers when new content is added.