Rate Calculator

The best lead generation tool for Real Estate Attorneys

A subscription WordPress plugin with a Drupal 8 back-end that provides a unique lead generation tool for Real Estate Attorneys. It's a niche product with broad potential for leveraging Drupal in unexpected, and profitable ways.

Rate Calculator is the best lead generation tool for real estate attorney Websites. It provides real-time closing cost estimates, giving attorneys the ability to capture visitor emails while reducing the number of phone calls their staff must field. The front-end is a WordPress plugin the attorney installs on their site, the back-end and subscription management is run by a Drupal 8 site.

The Drupal 8 site using Drupal Commerce Recurring Framework to manage the subscription. When an attorney signs up, a Simple OAuth consumer is generated and the unique keys are presented to them. Each plugin is authorized to be used by up to 3 domain names so it can be used for development and staging as well as the production website.

After signing up for the service, the attorney installs the WordPress plugin and connects to the service using Simple OAuth ( an optional installation service is offered ). The plugin provides a shortcode, a widget, and a Gutenberg block that can be placed anywhere on their site. Attorneys can customize the messaging, email template, and more so it works great with their brand and theme. Credentials are secured using the excellent Defuse PHP Encryption library.

The Drupal 8 site serves as an endpoint and proxies requests from a 3rd party service, greatly simplifying the the SOAP requests and returning JSON. When an end-user visits the attorney's Website and enters their information into the Rate Calculator, the request is anonymized before being sent to the Drupal site. After the request is authenticated, it is passed to a custom endpoint so the subscription can be verified. From there, the SOAP request is made to the third party service and response is sent back to the original WordPress site. This all happens in a fraction of a second, providing the end-user a seamless experience.

Rate Calculator Project Timeline

WordPress plugin

The WordPress plugin needed to work well no matter how the site was configured or theme that is in use. I spent a lot of time making the public facing calculator form flexible and accessible. Additionally, it needed to work with the WordPress block editor, with some basic configurations available for the site owner to customize the look.

Secure by default

While storing any password in a database has security risks, we took extra effort to make all of the passwords as secure as possible. All sensitive data is encrypted with the excellent Defuse PHP Encryption library prior to being stored in the database. We use OAuth 2 for secure communications between the plugin and the server.

Drupal 8 Back-end Server

Leveraging the Drupal ecosystem, including Simple OAuth and Commerce Recurring framework streamlined the creating of the API and account management operations. All that was needed was a custom checkout pane to collect the details needed to generate the OAuth consumer, and a custom REST endpoint for managing communications.