One year ago we released Open-Realty® v3.0,  which included new features like our Blog Manager, customizable SEO URL generation, the ability to post listings to Twitter, and a lot of other desirable features and improvements. The v3.0 release also marked the retirement of our open source project version of Open-Realty® and for the first time, professional commercial support was offered as a part of our OR v3 Professional Edition License. There was much speculation from the open source community and our usual detractors about OR moving from what was essentially a "free beer" business model to a commercial business model, and some naysayers even went so far as to insist that OR could never survive if offered as a commercially supported application. 

Fast-forward to now, a year later. What has happened? We have worked very hard and invested heavily over the past year to continue to improve Open-Realty®. As always, we resolve to do our very best to exceed both our old, and new customers' expectations. Adoption of Open-Realty v3.0, has surpassed what we projected for its first year, racking-up nearly 10,000 orders so far. More importantly, just as we promised our users a year ago, we have been able to provide feature updates and fixes more often, releasing no less than 18 free updates since OR v3's debut last year. Our development team has been able to respond to issues reported by our customers faster than ever before. We have added many new features like Mobile browser detection and support, Floor Agents, and template fallback support just to name a scant few. We also made a number of performance improvements to our search engine, and added new API commands to allow developers and the programs they create to more easily interact with Open-Realty® data, and to expand OR's core feature set and capabilities.

Over the last year we have also been very busy with IDX FTP and RETS import inquiries and sales of our MLS import add-ons. In tandem with the release of OR v3 we also released updated versions of our popular TransparentRETS and IDXManager MLS import software. We have also used the last year to further expand the range and number of RETS and IDX FTP feeds a developer using our software can accommodate. Our TransparentRETS and IDXManager add-ons remain the most adaptable, compatible, dependable, and flexible commercial do-it-yourself MLS import software available on the market today at any price.

In celebration of the 1 year anniversary of the release of Open-Realty® v3, we are offering 25% off the purchase price of an OR Professional License. Just use coupon code "1YRANNIV" when ordering.

What is next for Transparent Technologies and Open-Realty® in the upcoming year? Work on our next major release (OR v4) has been underway for some time, and we remain very excited about the future of OR as we embrace more emerging technologies and expand its core features. One thing all of our customers demand equally are faster websites that are capable of managing more real estate listings and providing a better experience for more and more concurrent site visitors. With our next version we will be focused primarily on improving the performance of OR overall, allowing even larger real estate listing databases and data sets to be managed. Along with performance improvements, we have also been working to complete our developer's API. In our next major release, every part of OR will use and depend on the API. This means that developers will have an unprecedented ability to customize, enhance, and build upon the Open-Realty® platform, while maintaining compatibility with future versions. These are just a few things we are working on now for the next big release, and there will be a lot more. Once we are a little further into our development cycle we will be offering a developer's preview for add-on developers so they will have the opportunity to start updating existing add-ons and creating new add-ons before the final release is made available.

To our customers and those who have remained loyal to our products and services and whose suggestions and criticisms have helped us improve Open-Realty® over what is now almost a decade: You are responsible for our success. THANK YOU! Without you, we would probably all be doing something for a living we did not enjoy as much as making Open-Realty®, and we would definitely not get to work with so many diverse and creative web site developers.

To our detractors, and those who would ride our coattails while proclaiming Open-Realty® is doomed to fail: Our software is better and more powerful than ever, and continues to be the most popular software available for building real estate web sites.

We must still be doing something right after almost 10 years of making real estate software, emulation is the highest form of flattery after all.

Ryan Bonham is the CEO and Lead developer of Transparent Technologies, Inc.