Announcing Availability 1.3

[calguy1000]

I am pleased to announce, after a long while, and a great deal of effort.... The first release of 'Availability' a new module for managing, scheduling, pricing, and reserving resources that are booked on a daily basis.   You can find it at: 
http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/availability

What does this do?

This module provides a complete online reservation management system for hotels, car rental agencies, or any other purpose where particular "resources" can be reserved on a daily basis.

This module provides a mechanism for frontend users to create and manage reservations, and to contact administrators with information and questions about reservations.

A complete admin interface allows authorized administrators to manage resources, events, reservations, and all aspects of the displayable items.

Features:

    * Allows defining unlimited numbers of resources.
          o A base daily price can be entered for each resource.
          o Price adjustments can be entered for each day of the week.
    * Allows defining an unlimited number of custom fields to associate with resources.
    * Allows creating event types and associating them with colors.
    * Supports creating events for particular resources over particular days:
          o Events can be bookable or non bookable, to block reservations for those resources for the selected dates.
          o bookable events can have a price adjustment to increase or decrease the price of the selected resources on the selected dates.
    * Supports automatic price calculation for reservations.
    * Supports automatic conflict checking to ensure that no reservations can be created for reserved resources, or closed resources for
       the selected dates.
    * More

This module is yet another in a long list of modules that has been sponsored by matterhorn marketing, and the community as a whole needs to give many thanks to Pat and his company for the impressive functionality that they have added to CMS Made Simple.

This is a large module, with extensive functionality, and seems to be working great, though it probably won't work well with a 'minimum' configuration.  You will probably have to expand your memory limit, and do a few other tweaks to  your configuration to use this module properly.  It still has a couple of minor features missing, but is already in production use.   I needed to release this module so that i could start working on filling in the gaps, and adding the next round of features.

Enjoy.

[jmcgin51]

Excellent!  Looking forward to trying it out.  In the process of moving a church website into a CMS framework, and one of the functionalities they need is room reservations.

Thanks in advance...

[jmcgin51]

calguy -

very nicely done!!  Just from the two or three hours I've had to play with it, it's clear that you put a lot of time/effort into making this a very versatile and extensible module.  Matterhorn must be pleased.

I noticed you said that there are some features still to come; can you give any details?

If you're looking for ideas, I would like to see the following.  (Maybe these features are already in the mod and I just haven't found them yet)

1. Ability to completely turn off pricing.  This would make the module even more useful for companies, non-profits, etc., who need to book conference rooms, meeting spaces, etc, but aren't charging.

2. Ability to book specific times.  Currently it appears that the administrator sets the start/end time, and all reservations are made for that specified time frame.  This works well for hotels, but for car rentals or many other types of reservations, it would be awesome to let the user specify the desired time slot.  (This one is actually a showstopper for my particular application, so I may need to try to integrate an external reservations system.)

3. Ability to book recurring events.  (Every x days/weeks/months, etc.)

I'll file these in the Forge when I get a few minutes.

Also, can you explain the difference between an Attribute and a Custom Field?  I'm having trouble thinking of when I would use one versus the other.  An example of each would be great.

Thanks so much for another awesome application!!

[calguy1000]

calguy -

very nicely done!!  Just from the two or three hours I've had to play with it, it's clear that you put a lot of time/effort into making this a very versatile and extensible module.  Matterhorn must be pleased.

I noticed you said that there are some features still to come; can you give any details?

Well, the view reservation feature isn't done yet.... that's intended for people that don't have permission to edit reservations, but need to look at the details.

And the messaging forms need a bit of cleanup.

I've just added an ability to charge $N/person/day over a specified resource 'capacity'... and am about to add bulk rate pricing in there somehow too.... and possibly tie in the tax modules from the E-commerce suite.

If you're looking for ideas, I would like to see the following.  (Maybe these features are already in the mod and I just haven't found them yet)

1. Ability to completely turn off pricing.  This would make the module even more useful for companies, non-profits, etc., who need to book conference rooms, meeting spaces, etc, but aren't charging.

can't you just set all the prices to 0 ?

2. Ability to book specific times.  Currently it appears that the administrator sets the start/end time, and all reservations are made for that specified time frame.  This works well for hotels, but for car rentals or many other types of reservations, it would be awesome to let the user specify the desired time slot.  (This one is actually a showstopper for my particular application, so I may need to try to integrate an external reservations system.)

Yeah this is based on daily reservations....  if somebody wants the ability to book time slots, then they'll probably have to sponsor that modification.

3. Ability to book recurring events.  (Every x days/weeks/months, etc.)

Yeah, this would be handy for things like meeting rooms, etc....

Also, can you explain the difference between an Attribute and a Custom Field?  I'm having trouble thinking of when I would use one versus the other.  An example of each would be great.

An attribute is a flag associated with a particular resource.... something like 'has projector', 'has wifi', 'has jacuzzi', etc.   You can filter on attributes in the summary view, and later will be able to filter on attributes in the search form.   Custom fields are extra data items attached to each resource (like notes, images, files, etc).   you cannot search or filter on these fields.

CompanyDirectory has the same thing.... except it uses the term 'Categories' instead of 'Attributes'.

[jmcgin51]

Very cool.

I just tried setting the room price to $0 (base price and daily prices), and it gives me a calculation error when I click the "Calculate" button.  (Trying to reserve for one day.)

I will contact you directly if we decide that a time-slot mod is something that we want to sponsor.

Thanks!

[calguy1000]

I just tried setting the room price to $0 (base price and daily prices), and it gives me a calculation error when I click the "Calculate" button.  (Trying to reserve for one day.)!

Yeah, that's fixed in my latest code.  and a few minor glitches with the frontend reservation form.

[Pierre M.]

Hello,

This module is yet another in a long list of modules that has been sponsored by matterhorn marketing, and the community as a whole needs to give many thanks to Pat and his company for the impressive functionality that they have added to CMS Made Simple.

Thank you Pat and thank you Calguy.

Pierre

[MasterLee]

i got it installed and working 

[Renwaar]

I'm having a little trouble with installing this module, I have uploaded from XML and the module is not installed due to:

Missing Dependencies as below.

Name Minimum Version Installed
CGExtensions 1.11 False
CGSimpleSmarty 1.3.1 False
FrontEndUsers 1.5.3 False

However I have CG Extensions 1.9 and the other two modules are showing as incompatible in the Module Manager.

I am currently running 1.4.1, is this just a simple case of upgrade needed?

Thanks in advance, and thanks to Calguy for the continued great work.

Renwaar

[Coldman]

Yes Renwaar you need to upgrade your CMSMS 1.5.3