Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : A booking / calendar free web app
Sixtease
10-20-2008, 04:00 PM
Hello everybody.
I'm looking for a web application I could run on my server that would allow people to book a service.
More specifically, my mom gives massages and when somebody wants to come, they need to call her, she checks when she's free and if they agree on a time, then she notes it. I'd like this to be done through the web app. She would just say when she is available and people would just come on her site, check when she's free and book a term.
I'm sure I'm not the first one who needs this, so I'm convinced it must have been programmed already. I don't care what (programming) language it is in but I want it to be free software and either skinnable or nice-looking out of the box. :-)
Got any tips?
Thanks a lot.
Can you be a little more specific. What type of user interface are you describing? What would the exact procedures be in the gathering of data and the displaying of the schedule? The reason I'm asking is because I'm interested in developing such an app. I do have a working prototype as we speak, but need more details to complete such a program.
Sixtease
11-10-2008, 02:30 AM
This is a nice and unexpected kind of reply indeed. :-)
I'm imagining a view where the owner of the calendar would define their available time, in a manner of regular schedule and one-time exceptions. The calendar would remember available / unavailable times and booked / non-booked times (these would be orthogonal since we want to let the owner accept a booking even in a time where they said they're not available).
Another view would show the calendar to the public where visitors would see when the owner is free (= available & non-booked). They could then choose a timespan to book along with their identification (name, e-mail) and optionally a short message. This would make that time, say, "tentative". The booking would show up in the owner's calendar and a notification would be optionally sent to them. The owner would then either reject the booking, which would cause that time to again show up as free or they would accept, which would cause that time to show up as taken.
This would be the basic functionality. I also see room for enhancements. The owner could define minimum breaks between bookings. Say they would set that to 15 minutes. Then, if I booked for 12:30 - 14:00, the calendar would show me as taken from 12:15 to 14:15.
Another enhancement could be for the client to provide a password, which would enable them to cancel a booking they had previously made.
A conceptual enhancement could be to make a JavaScript front-end that would show these things and to make an independent back-end that would take care of the calendar. Then it would be possible to make it work with Google Calendar, which would be great for those who use it and it could even mean that one could run this without any server side scripting on their own.
svidgen
11-10-2008, 04:16 AM
I'm not sure the booking system I developed would meet all of your requirements "out of the box." But, if don't find what you're looking for in the near future, let me know. I'm pretty sure I can give away most of the code without breaking any contracts with the client I wrote it for ...
... The JavaScript calendar portion is actually open source anyway (and updated frequently): http://www.dynarch.com/projects/calendar/
Sixtease
11-10-2008, 05:06 AM
I'm not sure the booking system I developed would meet all of your requirements "out of the box." But, if don't find what you're looking for in the near future, let me know. I'm pretty sure I can give away most of the code without breaking any contracts with the client I wrote it for ...
... The JavaScript calendar portion is actually open source anyway (and updated frequently): http://www.dynarch.com/projects/calendar/
Thanks a lot for the offer. I'll keep it in mind. I'm quite interested to see what CyCo develops but I'll be sure to check your app out.
By the way. what language is the server-side part in?
Let's keep it on the forums so others can get help also. Can you share what you PM'd?
loklomedia
11-27-2008, 07:45 PM
This is almost exactly what I need as well. A calendar, though it needs login credentials (I can do that with .htaccess or another separate system). Then users can create their own bookings, based on free/busy time (not able to see details of what the other users have booked). Upon booking, send to a paypal gateway for pre-payment of the service.
I hope that CyCo is in a sharing kind of a mood :). I have a paying client, so I could pass on some funds if needed.
Thanks.