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Reservations for hotel rooms and restaurant


Marco Angeli
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Hi there,

Just planning how to make online reservations for hotel rooms and restaurant.

Is there an easy way to do it? (I'm thinking about a module...)

Or a suggestion about a third party plugin that best fits?

..or...how can it be done using PW?

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Marco,

I'm no Joomla fanboy, but there is a point where you might be going down a path of developing something that other developers have already spent years working on... this is probably the sort of thing that I would just bite the bullet and go with something already made:

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/vertical-markets/booking-a-reservations/booking

the Artio booking component looked decent.

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Greetings,

I felt a needle-like pain in my head, and wondered where it was coming from... Ah, there it is -- Joomla and Artio.

All jokes aside, it is true that in Joomla there are ready-made components that take care of a whole range of actions.  But then you have to override what you don't want or need, wage mortal battles where various pieces of baked-in Joomla code conflict with your modules and plugins, and spend hours trying to get a developer's attention long enough to figure out where in the world they placed the code for a particular action you need to customize, and why they put it there.  And let's not forget that no Joomla component can be used without... Joomla!  Which means you are also inheriting its migraine-inducing template system, admin area, lack of custom fields, mind-numbing dummy menu entries and plugin ordering (Joomla people will know what I mean by these last two).

OK, let me take a breath...

I understand the idea of using something that has "been done already."  But since I started using ProcessWire, in all seriousness, it takes me less time to create something from scratch than to wrangle with any of Joomla's "ready-made" code.

Two better ways to go:

1. Get part-by-part help from the community

2. Find ready-made JQuery, PHP, and other components that can hook into ProcessWire

Thanks,

Matthew

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yeah of course that's true about joomla...

but you would have to weigh the cost of rolling your own booking system, could be a lot of work.

some of those components already have advanced forms, calendar selectors, payment integration etc..;
 

@Marco -

you sort of answered your own question -

the first link uses

http://www.opentable.com/

and the 2nd is a wordpress plugin; but there are some others on codecanyon that look standalone:

http://codecanyon.net/item/booking-system/full_screen_preview/87919

http://codecanyon.net/item/booking-calendar/full_screen_preview/2684019

http://codecanyon.net/item/online-hotel-booking-system/full_screen_preview/2680320

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If you can wait, I'm currently working on a booking module for ProcessWire :)

Currently it has specific needs for a specific job, so allows bookings on non-consecutive days, but will have consecutive days as an option by the time I'm finished (more useful for accommodation then).

One thing I would say is that a restaurant booking system and a room booking system have very different needs. Both have been at the back of my mind when developing this module, but I need to look into the options required for a restaurant booking system when I get further along with this - the links in the first post here are helpful for that.

There are some other nice features I don't want to give away just yet, but it might be worth waiting if you can for a few weeks.

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One thing I would say is that a restaurant booking system and a room booking system have very different needs.

so true...many scripts are focused on room/house booking but I can't find anything about table reservation... maybe it's too complex?

Anyway, here are some resources about it:

http://www.monkeydish.com/equipment-technology/articles/wave-competition-goes-after-opentables-throne

Beware italian users! these solutions don't work for you. An option could be: http://www.tavoloso.com

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I think the problems inherent with a table booking system are as follows (and this is with no real research by the way):

  1. Do restaurants have a good grasp of how long a table will be occupied for? If so, give them an option (maybe default to 2 hours per table)
  2. Different table sizes will affect the booking. You need to enter your party size ideally to see what is available. That or the restaurant may be able to push tables together in many cases - how do you deal with that?
  3. If you're using a web booking system for a restaurant and it needs to be up to date, the system needs updating whenever walk-in customers come into the restaurant. Either that or you can only book online X hour in advance (4 hours default maybe?).

Basically, what I'm getting at is that there are far more variables in play than other booking systems.

Booking a holiday cottage is easy - it's got a fixed number of beds - no problem. Booking a hotel room is slightly trickier - you have more options, not just with how many beds per room, but type of room.

The more I think about it, the less likely every eventuality will be covered just by the module I'm creating. I think it far more likely that each scenario needs to be tailored and that they might  be best as site profiles since there will be a lot of templates with them.

As such, the module I'm working on may help as a starting point for accommodation/asset-based booking, but won't be much help for table bookings and other time-of-day based scenarios. At least, not in version 1.

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  • 2 months later...
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Hi sappel

It's still being finished off in terms of front-end functionality which I'm hoping to do the next couple of days, but as the system has evolved it's not going to be something that can be used by others straight out of the box. It's currently very tailored to the specific functionality of the client I'm working with and would require some work to scale it back a bit and modularise it a bit better.

I really want to post a video showing what I mean soon but need to get it done first :)

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  • 1 year later...
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Hi sappel

It's still being finished off in terms of front-end functionality which I'm hoping to do the next couple of days, but as the system has evolved it's not going to be something that can be used by others straight out of the box. It's currently very tailored to the specific functionality of the client I'm working with and would require some work to scale it back a bit and modularise it a bit better.

I really want to post a video showing what I mean soon but need to get it done first :)

Hey Pete,

Is this project still active for you? 

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