Booking & Reservation & Rental - Buy date/time ?

Currently there is no such work. The field is very big and it more looks like little component. This question is more idea.

i'm interesting too :)

We do plan to develop SSI field like that. We were waiting situation like this. When it is come to practiacal application. Please tell me what is you tmeframe and I'll tell you if you can wait or better not to.

The field is very big and it more looks like little component. This question is more idea.

ANd Katerina is right. based on our previose experiance with this kind of field it is very complicated. Especially what you want it to be universal. It is much easier to create for something particular. For example holiday appartment renting. But when you need to make field that can rnt by hours, days, ... show differently reservations and so on, I think it will take a lot of time.

The field is very big and it more looks like little component. This question is more idea.

PS: The previous ME Resources "Availability Calendar" was not usable, IMHO.

Do you mean Mighty Comemrce product type rent?

Beat it with simplicity? Beat it with seemless integration in Joomla? Beat it with price? I don´t know.

I think there are 2 ways to go.

1. Develop new field for every next case. For example book kar, book apartment, book seat at theater, ... Then we may be very specific. not so many parameters because we already know where we apply this field. Only some adjastements. But in this case a lot of field may be created and a lot of code will be redundant.

2. We create one universal field for booking. But in this case a lot of difefrent parameters are there. Need more brain power to configure.

Beat it with simplicity? Beat it with seemless integration in Joomla? Beat it with price? I don´t know.

Beat it with price?

I do not think we have to beat them. I am sure some of their features so important, that their users will never give it up. we will just win some of them who needs what we can provide.

Our advantage I think wil be CCK. The fact that you can add additional fields and extend your booking app. Powerfull filtering system and notifications. All other featrures of Cobalt and all other Joomla extenasions that may be integrated.

Our advantage I think wil be CCK. The fact that you can add additional fields and extend your booking app. Powerfull filtering system and notifications.

Totally agree with you! The powerful combination can be the key, and the real difference.

So, which way we go Maik? 1 or 2?

great suggestions

Pleased to meet you all here. It's nice to see so much enthusiasm over a product by both developers and users.

I am old in booking business, quite old in Joomla but completely new here. I noticed that it was mentioned that some kind of plugin may be developed to support booking within CCK.

As I'm looking for the 'framerwork' to base my new holiday rentals catalogue on, I may be another interested client for the feature.

Sergey here suggested there are plans for such a development. Anything done, or in progress?

To comment on some of discussion - the need for such field? or an advantage over solutions already present? I have to agree with Sergey saying it's CCK. That's exactly why I'm typing here - there are few excellent booking solutions for holiday rentals (IMHO in Joomla Joomres is ultimate one) - but they don't allow me to present my content nearly the way I want. Each require heavy improvisation, customization in term of hard coding stuff in original script - and even then possibilities are limited. So I would like to present my holiday rentals in a way I want - and still have some booking functionality. Thus the CCK.

Regarding approach - here I have to agree with Malik and Ekatarina - it can get very very very complicated. Not to go into cars/tables/appointments - just with holiday rentals you can have tons of stuff - different pricing (per unit, per person, combined, seasons, conditional pricing etc.), extras, discounts, gathering reservation info on customer, advance payment, issuing of voucher/invoice etc. etc. etc. However, personally I would be satisfied with some basic availability/booking functionality. Later on it can be extended. If client is overhelmed with bookings - he can always pay some custom work to developers here to get it done :) .

One other issue to consider here is multilingual approach I've seen discussed on other topics. As Sergey pointed out - Cobalt is to use Joomla 2.x multilingual approach of having separate sets of contents for each language. But for such a catalogue of cars/holiday lettings that kind of approach simply can't work. 'Mirroring' content approach would be much more natural approach here. Having English apartment #123 booked - I also need Russian, German etc apartment #123 booked - they need to share pricing, availability calendar etc., yet they need decent marketable description in each language. Any ideas here? I have some experience using not-natively multilingual directories in multilingual environment - as long as we can translate labels, predefined values of checkboxes and similar fields - the description itself can be done with the separate field for each language - filtered in template.

I'm sorry for the long post - but I got an impression that several people here are/were thinking along these lines - so I would appreciate opinions as well as information of if I should consider cobalt as a solution.

Pleased to meet you all here. It's nice to see so much enthusiasm over a product by both developers and users...

Nice to have another mind and fresh opinions in the boat. Welcome!

Pleased to meet you all here. It's nice to see so much enthusiasm over a product by both developers and users...

...it can get very very very complicated. Not to go into cars/tables/appointments - just with holiday rentals you can have tons of stuff - different pricing (per unit, per person, combined, seasons, conditional pricing etc.), extras, discounts, gathering reservation info on customer, advance payment, issuing of voucher/invoice etc. etc. etc. ...

Not sure if "rules and pricing" is the most complicated part or the structure in general. I recently had a small car rental project, and it turned out to be more complex than I expected. Complex means: Special client wishes and pricing options that almost no Joomla extensions could offer.

I tried and investigated many online services. I filtered down on 2 applicants:

• Planyo
• Checkfront

Planyo made the race in my particular case...

because of better pricing for startups, pricing rules, integrations, backend management, german speaking support (swiss). It was not so easy to get my head around the vast amount of infos and options, but the docs, faqs and fast support helped a lot. Multilanguage switch is working fine. Mobile display and overall design should get an update ;-) I had a lot of CSS tweaks to do, and some things are found in different places/files.

Technically, Checkfront looks way better. A modern backend and mobile apps are available. No wonder, they are bigger and updated there system recently. Integration modules had to be updated to v2 as well and were not available in my timeframe. Checkfront has also many integrations and a modern backend.

I can´t recall it exactly, but it seems Planyo was more flexible in booking times and modes. But that might have changed or might be equal now. In general, any booking service seems to have a similar logic and modes. A booking time mode is attached to a resource... but can´t be switched during booking procedure i.e. switch between hourly, daily or fixed timeframes. If you have a hint about such a service... please tell me ;-)

I recommend to check both services and create a trial account. You can also ask for and turn your account into a developer account! Which gives you all the time to test and demo all features. Hope this short conclusion is helpful for someone else.

Pleased to meet you all here. It's nice to see so much enthusiasm over a product by both developers and users...

...it can get very very very complicated. Not to go into cars/tables/appointments - just with holiday rentals you can have tons of stuff - different pricing (per unit, per person, combined, seasons, conditional pricing etc.), extras, discounts, gathering reservation info on customer, advance payment, issuing of voucher/invoice etc. etc. etc. ...

... However, personally I would be satisfied with some basic availability/booking functionality. ...

Agree. I guess we have to compromise on features and special rules. Keep it simple and common. Thats why I mentioned the other products and examples. They are quite different... and often the simplicity and easyness is the winner (IMHO).

Pleased to meet you all here.

You are mostly welcome. Your post is highly appreciated. Especially part where you list features for this field. :D

Pleased to meet you all here.

Sergey here suggested there are plans for such a development. Anything done, or in progress?

Not yet. Working hard on Cobalt 8.

Pleased to meet you all here.

Sergey here suggested there are plans for such a development. Anything done, or in progress?

But for such a catalogue of cars/holiday lettings that kind of approach simply can't work. 'Mirroring' content approach would be much more natural approach here

This what Cobalt supports by default. But we also will adopt it for JoomFish or Josetta. This will provide another way.

Availability check - How to?

Any Concepts or ideas?

Just curious what people and developers think about a simple availability check with dates. Something that could be created with Cobalt build-in features like parent-child fields, dates, notifications and event triggers ? Any thoughts are appreciated...

It's my opition to create different fields for each case for the following reasons(so you will have a section for booking options): 1. Easier to maintain 2. Focus to the need 3. Lighter loading time since less requirements (I think) 4. Specific fieds eg.hotel booking can have lot's of parameters just for hotels thus more popular, user friendly and satisfy more users. 5. End user can make modifications without digging into 100 lines of code 6. Hotel rooms with theater seeds have different requirements. Seeds can be divided into classes, Hotel can be divided into the number of beds

This is my opinion.

I agree.