Booking Manager and Availability Calendar plugin v0.4a

Posted December 17, 2006 // Tagged as Plugins // 30 Comments ↓


Availability DownloadVersion 0.4a of the Booking Manager and Availability Calendar is now available for download by clicking on the Download link on the right hand side of this post.

Installation and Upgrade instructions can be found on this page.

This version includes a number of improvements and bug fixes including (but not limited to) those listed below:

  • Character encoding bug fix for foreign languages - on some servers the correct encoding for foreign language month names wasn’t being used. This should now be fixed.
  • Speed improvement for month generation - not really noticeable, but the algorithm to mark booked dates has been radically improved. This should improve the speed, and also adds flexibility to the calendar system - more soon.
  • Arrival and Departure times - You can now enter the arrival and departure times of guests in the booking details.
  • Deposit and Full amount recording - Added fields to allow the storage of Deposit amounts and Full amounts (with multiple currencies).

Support
Please ask any support questions for this version as a comment below.

30 Responses

  1. Jesse Rochman

    January 14th, 2007 at 7:08 pm

    Are there any plans to tie this in with a payment gateway such as PayPal or GoogleCheckout?

  2. tim ramsey

    January 15th, 2007 at 12:26 am

    plugin installed, activated, default options accepted. booking were stored and could be recalled. Put calendar display code on page, and calendar displayed nicely. However, the calendar shows no indication that the booked dates are unavailable (all dates shown the same). ?

  3. Barry

    January 15th, 2007 at 1:31 am

    Have you set up a style for the booked dates? To make sure that the dates are being marked as booked in the HTML, view the source and look for the words class=”booked” next to an unavailable date.
    If it is there, then you need to set up some styles. Have a look at this link:
    http://blog.clearskys.net/plugins/availability-plugin/styling-your-calendar/

  4. Paul

    January 18th, 2007 at 10:41 am

    A great tool - I love it. Thanks so much for your work.
    One Question: Is it possible, to show the content (!) of the booked days in a list inside the sidebar, or inside a post/page? - F.e. if there is a booking like “Roadshow, from 01/01/2007 until 01/15/2007″, so I would like to have a list inside a page that would show the following line: “01/01/2007 - 01/15/2007 - booked - Roadshow”.

    Thanks in advance and Regards Paul

  5. Barry

    January 18th, 2007 at 11:00 am

    Hi, thanks for the comment.
    You could setup and use the Bookings RSS feed for such a purpose. If you wanted to display more than just the dates and if they were booked, then you would have to use the private RSS feed.
    Add an RSS display widget to your side bar, and set it to display the titles in your RSS private RSS feed. This will display the booking title and the dates. e.g. Roadshow: Thu 8 March 2007 to Tue 20 March 2007

  6. Bazza

    January 20th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    I’m on wordpress 2.0.7, but when I go into the presentation menu, I don’t see a “Sidebar Widgetsâ€? option. The theme I’m using says it allows widgets.
    Can you help?

  7. Barry

    January 21st, 2007 at 12:46 pm

    Have you got the Widgets Plugin installed and activated ( http://automattic.com/code/widgets/ )? You need both the plugin and a widget ready theme for the Sidebar Widgets menu option to show up.

  8. Barry

    January 22nd, 2007 at 5:17 pm

    Great, didn’t realise that there was a widget plugin, installed and all working okay.
    Just one more question. I’m trying to get a role other than administrator to be able to modify the calendar. Any ideas on how to set this up for say an editor or author profile?

  9. Barry

    January 23rd, 2007 at 1:07 am

    It’s actually something I’m looking into at the moment for the enquiry plugin. As soon as I work something out I’ll post an update. Or if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

  10. clint

    January 24th, 2007 at 7:01 pm

    is it possible to display only 1 month and just add arrows to navigate “Previous Month” and “Next Month” . thanks!

  11. Barry

    January 25th, 2007 at 6:57 pm

    Hi, at the moment, no is the easy answer. There is probably a way to do it with some clever ajax scripting. I will have a think and see if I can come up with a solution.

  12. Vicky

    January 29th, 2007 at 12:52 pm

    Hello,

    I’ve just started getting into Wordpress as a CMS for clients and discovered your calendar this morning. It looks really smart. However my client has a property with 10 bedrooms - is there a possibility of extending this so that you can manage the individual rooms?

  13. Barry

    January 30th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    At present you can display calendars for multiple properties/rooms quite easily. Adding bookings using the administration panel requires for multiple properties/rooms requires a bit of messing around with the property no on the options panel. The next release will make the management of multiple properties/rooms easier.

  14. Andre Wallner

    February 2nd, 2007 at 4:58 pm

    Hi Barry, great work!
    This is something, i was looking for a long time.
    But my prefered CMS is Joomla, alltough i trying hard make my site work with wordpress, it is not easy, because its totally different to work with. So my question: Are there any plans to port your plugins to Joomla 1.5?

    Greetings Andre

  15. Barry

    February 2nd, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    Hi
    I am currently working on versions of the plugins for Wordpress and Modx as well as a hosted version. Once the API’s are finalised it will be much easier to move the plugins to other CMS systems and platforms. So at the moment there are no plans to develop for Joomla, but watch this space.

  16. Laurent Debacker

    March 7th, 2007 at 10:35 pm

    Would it be possible to enhance the plug-in so that free dates can be marked with different tarifs (high season, etc).
    This was, different colors could differentiate the different tarifs?

  17. Richard Brown

    March 15th, 2007 at 8:11 pm

    Hi
    Thanks for the plugin. It looks excellent. I installed using 2.1 so I hope that is ok. I can see the clearskys link and I can edit the settings but when I click on bookings I get a blank page. Any ideas please?
    Thanks.
    Rich

  18. Barry

    March 16th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    It should work on 2.1 (it’s what I am using for this site). So I’m not 100% sure why you would get one screen and not the other, with no error message. I shall investigate.

  19. Richard Brown

    March 27th, 2007 at 3:01 pm

    Hi Barry
    Any news on this one at all please? Would it help if I gave you access to the site please?
    Thanks.
    Rich

  20. Richard Brown

    March 27th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    Hi Barry
    Should have added that when I activate the plugin, posts are not seen. What I mean is that if I use the default theme, the header is displayed but after that nothing is on view!
    Hope that helps.
    Rich

  21. Joe

    April 15th, 2007 at 5:41 am

    Very nice work! I have one huge recommendation for the calendar plug-in. As I’m sure you know, updating calendars is a major pain, especially when you advertise on dozens of portal sites and have 10 or more to do each time you get a booking. Urrrggg.. what a pain.

    In the USA, I would say 90% of property owners use the Availability Calendar on http://rentors.org/

    Here’s a sample Calendar:
    http://rentors.org/calendar.aspx?propertyid=174674&culturename=en-US

    Many of the vacation rental advertising portals in the US already tie in to this calendar, making it very easy for a potential guest to easily see availability. Property owners like it, because they update once, and it’s available across multiple sites.

    So, the ability to scrape data from rentors.org would be a huge benefit to the plug-in, and it’s users. While this site is in the USA market, Im sure a similar service is available in Spain and other countries. Having the ability to scrape a variety of the largest calendar services would be huge.

    This is probably a big undertaking.. but I wanted to mention it and add it to the “wish list”.

    Keep up the great work–amazing! I just found you today and I can already tell I will be making a donation soon.

    Joe

  22. Barry

    April 16th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Hi Joe
    Many thanks for the comments.

    The funny thing is, one of the things that pushed me to start work on these plugins was rentors.org.
    Late last year their website had a section looking for partners and mentioning an ability to “Link” calendars so that partner site could update the rentors.org calendar.
    I emailed them and managed to contact a very rude person who insisted that they only allowed a site to link to their site, so the calendar would be held by rentors.org.

    This was of absolutely no use to me at all, at the time, as they didn’t provide anyway for me to search for properties by availability, as I didn’t control the calendar information.

    Thus the management plugin was born, and more importantly, the work I’m doing to try to build a system that will allow people to take their calendar anywhere.

    Availability calendars should not need to be updated in many different places. The owner of the property should own the calendar and it’s data and it’s up to the portals to keep subscribed.

    Ok, rant over….
    BTW: I do have a rentors.org scraper already built…

  23. Cat

    October 15th, 2007 at 9:39 pm

    I am a photographer, and this looks like it would be a wonderful way to show availabilities to prospective clients on my blog. I tried installing it, but could never get the calendar to show - not sure what I did wrong there, I will try again later, but another thing - would it be possible to make the bookings as short as one day?

  24. ???? ???? » Blog Archive » openslot

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  26. cbaone

    January 27th, 2009 at 10:56 pm

    Barry,
    Did the ModX conversion ever get any traction? Or are you still working on it?

  27. Barry

    February 6th, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    @cbaone -
    It was delayed whilst I was working on the WordPress versions. Working on both was slowing me down :) However, given recent WordPress based events - I think it could be coming back quite quickly.

  28. Ray

    March 7th, 2009 at 12:40 am

    If the new versions aren’t quite ready for Wordpress 2.7, does that mean the old versions are suitable for Wordpress 2.6, or is it an earlier Wordpress? I’d install an old Wordpress just to get functionality and the ability to demo the current capabilities, while I wait for the new stuff.

  29. el Rafa

    March 8th, 2009 at 6:57 am

    @Barry - Glad to hear this. What can we do to help?

  30. Jon

    March 10th, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Anyone willing to give me an idiot guide as to how to run this with multiple properties? I can get feeds to different properties easilybut i need to make it friendly for the client so they can easily input bookings for different properties. i guess i need an input box in the booking form or something.

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