I'm just curious if anyone knows of some useful resources for learning more about the whole IDX concept (and MLS in general). I just started working with my first real estate client, and am now jumping into the wonderful world of MLS ;-).

The problem I have is that everything I've found so far tries to explain things in layman's terms, which is pretty useless from a web developer's point of view. I need something that covers the technical end of things and actually gets down and dirty.

Any help appreciated!

The IDX concept in a nutshell.

Assuming you have access to an IDX feed you must:

1. Get it on your website. The usual manner is to use a cron job (or similar) to upload the IDX to the server at regular intervals.
2. Convert the data to a usable format. The data and image files are stored in a zip file and the data files are usually in an xls or cvs format. The usual way is to convert the data to SQL and export it to your database tables.
3. Have or develop a program so users can search and display listings on the website.

There are many tools to choose from to accomplish the above. I use open realty because it is open source, has a css/xhtml compliant frontend, has many features and can be customized to my satisfaction.

Converting an IDX to a website MLS is only moderately difficult. The major difficulty for a developer or designer is support. There are many things that can and will go wrong during the life of a website. I recently had difficulty with missing photos that was tracked down to an additional naming scheme. No one was notified of the change so it took several hours to find the problem but less than 5 minutes to add the code to accommodate the addition.

We have been involved in IDX conversions and have several options for other developers and designers to partner with us.

Thank you! That's exactly what I was looking for - you probably just saved me from more hours of weeding through useless FAQ's ;-)