Introducing StayPress
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After a great deal of work, I am pleased to introduce a sneak peek at the new StayPress system.
StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…
The new StayPress system takes over from the previous clearskys.net collection of plugins and brings everything together into a more manageable and co-ordinated group.
Whilst there will obviously be a downloadable version of the StayPress plugins, we are also planning a hosted version of the system for those who do not want the trouble of running their own website.
If you would like to be kept informed of updates and our release dates then please subscribe to either this sites RSS Feed or visit StayPress.com and subscribe to the StayPress only blog.
StayPress is in no way affiliated with Automattic or WordPress, other than being built on one of the best web CMS systems around.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Nice work, I’ll be sure to keep tabs on it.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Hey, I’m actually building WPMU based site for private accommodations for more than 2 months now. Few weeks ago I stumbled upon your website and saw that booking plugin. I was amazed and have already ‘bombed’ you with a lot of questions. And now this:) Let me know if you need new testers.
Cheers
May 14th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Just one question regarding MU version of plugin:
‘Property’ profile = User Blog ?
Thanks
May 14th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Sorry, you’ve lost me
It’s easily done.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Looking forward to this release. Great work!
May 15th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Well, if you are interested I can explain how my booking system will look like (categorization, galleries, location maps,…). With your ‘booking managment’, ‘availability calendar’ and ‘inquiry’ plugins I have all I need. Although I didn’t get them to work with WPMU as they should but all the instructions can be found somwhere in forums. Gallery issue is solved in new WPMU 1.5.1. But still, I’ll wait for StayPress to be released. And of course I plan to be your ’sponsor’ as soon as I will be able to. Thanks.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:34 am
This looks great. Most property management systems out there at the moment are bloated and really non user-friendly. Looks like this might be a nice breath of fresh air.
And the fact that the site will still be able to encorporate a blogging platform using the same CMS is amazing.
Any chance of a bigger screenshot?
The interface is looking really tight so far. great work.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Came across this via Ma.TT’s site, and wanted to say that I’m really looking forward to the release of this multi-plugin too!
May 15th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Hi… I stumbled on your URL from a news feed in my wordpress-mu. The URL above is where we have some manually-edited booking content… so you can see where I would love to play with this in a single-resource context.
Are you the developer of staypress? If so, why not put a live demo online? I know there’s the issue of dropping it, clearing it, and restarting, but that can be cronjobbed. Thing is, you also get the user-traffic to test your system while showing people “beta.staypress.com” beside “demo.staypress.com” (new stuff vs current stuff).
May 15th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Good luck Barry, I am very interested to see how you get on with this and have subscribed to your feeds.
BTW, the feed on your parking page for StayPress.com is not working although the email subscriptions are.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Wordskill: Thanks, I’ve fixed the feed now, apparently feedburner needs an initial post to function correctly.
Allan: A public demo is in the works - there is still a bit of development/tweaking/finishing to do before I am happy that the current functionality is ready to be attacked
Watch this space (or the StayPress space)
May 16th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Sounds very interesting, It could be very usefull.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:11 am
This is fantastic idea I look forward to the release and hopefully looking at way that I could use it on my own blog site.. nice work. James
May 18th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Interesting and useful idea. Why only look at properties, et al? I think that for a mass adoption, also look at the daily tasks where Staypress can be used.
How about finding the status and booking the meeting rooms in an office? I am sure that if Staypress finds applications for a corporate environment, everyone will love doing the bookings for these rooms online, rather than the secys running around with booking forms. Just a thought.
May 18th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Gagan: As Barry stated in the post, it will be a booking system which you can apply to “any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability”. It is called “StayPress” because his own focus is on vacation rentals but he apparently plans to keep it general enough to be applied to anything from hair-dressing appointments to ladder rentals.
Personally, I think that, if handled the right way, this project has much more potential than, for instance, the WordPress-sponsored BuddyPress project.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
@WordSkill - I couldn’t agree with you more.
@Barry - When can we expect it to be released? Thanks.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Blogistan Panoptikum KW20 2008…
Eine Woche wie keine andere: die Nummer 20 2008 blickt zurück und schaut nach vorne - und das zweimal!
……
May 19th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Fantastic, look forward to seeing what you’ve come up with. My Mum and Dad run a B&B and I’d love to be able to give them this capability.
There’s a property management plugin for Joomla which I tried but it was too complicated to set up (said it needed some php software that my host swore was already installed).
May 19th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Thanks @WordSkill for the buddypress - I was not aware of it. I think I am getting a bit slow as the hair turn grey :-). Anyways, agree with you and Zets - the project has a lot of potential.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Thank you for the comments everyone.
Things are moving along and I will post some more screen-shots and hopefully a little screen-cast here and on the StayPress site soon.
Gagan: The term property can be thought of as a building or venue which in itself can be rented as a whole (or not) or can contain 1 or more rooms for rent - so the system is quite flexible in that respect and there are no hard and fast rules on what a “property” or “room” should be.
In fact you can change those words through out the system quite easily.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I’m going to chew on tinfoil to keep my mind off of this…
As a kayaker, this would be awesome for my friends to signup for a trip where the number of slots are limited. I hope I can exercise my powers of nepotism and pre-signup the sporty-spice
Aarggh. I could use this yesterday.
Thanks for your work, guy.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
@Kayaker - same thing here
I even stopped developing my travel web site because of this project. I just hope that it will be released soon enough.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Any idea when this effort will be finished ?
May 27th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Hi Barry
I was about to build my own Wordpress booking system when I came across StayPress. I’m interested in using StayPress as a class booking system where users can book a class and pay for it using PayPal. Can you tell me if StayPress will include a payment system (hopefully using PayPal) or does it only handle bookings.
I would appreciate an answer as it will help me decide if I should wait for StayPress or if I should build my own booking system.
A timeframe would also be nice if you have one as I am on a schedule.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
@Minh-Dang: It will include links to a payment system, but this is a fair way down the roadmap and will be added to the administration end of things first before it makes it to the front-end system.
To clarify things, there are distinct sets of plugins, the main one is the StayPress administration group which incorporates all of the admin side of things such as handling properties / bookings / enquiries / etc..
On top of that is the StayPress site group which will display the relevant front end site content / calendars and enquiry / booking forms for a single site / office.
Alternatively there is the StayPress portal group which can handle the display of multiple sites / offices information and pass the enquiries to the relevant site / office.
The main work at the moment is in getting the administration part of things up and available then work will move to adding functionality to the Site and Portal groups
May 27th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
* starting to rock back and forth *
I’m moving from the tin foil to glass.
I’ll be using this on WPMu. If I enable these plugins for multiple users, it would be useful to be able to group each seperate user’s data and subsequently provide specific views on specific pages of this data.
Urrgh.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Heh that’s pretty nifty.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
This is awesome, it’s got huge potential.
Restaurant owners could also use it for table bookings in their restaurant
June 1st, 2008 at 6:56 am
Wow, very interesting. I went through a hideous process trying to build a property management web system using an offshore development company–the aim was to have blogs attached to the microsites for the properties. When they “finished” it we abandoned the project, it was so far from useful that we couldn’t bear the thought of trying to fix it. I Your approach looks far better.
I will indeed make a contribution.
Oh, appros of absolutely nothing, you might find this interesting, or at least diverting. It’s a somewhat wacky landing site my company just did for the Intel Software Partner Program: http://www.mysoftwarefilm.com/
June 16th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Hi Barry
Just revisiting your site to see if you have any update, thanks for the prompt reply to my first post. I will check back shortly in case you reply promptly again
It seemed that you’re still some way off to the launching of the plugin, at 27th May, you were still working on the administration part.
Question: When you finish the adminstration and functionality, will you be releasing it then or are you going to finish the Portal part before releasing it?
For people like me who don’t need the Portal part, I like to get my hands on this plugin asap
As for the PayPal payment system, that’s ok. In the short term, I can make it a two part process, first the user book for a spot, then they go to another page and make a payment.
Where are you up to with this plugin if you don’t mind me asking? As I’m under pressure to start something soon.
PS: Isn’t it a great problem when you have people banging at your door even before your product is ready? lol
June 27th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
OMG, add me to the list of those who can’t wait for this.
June 28th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Hi all…
I too would step up to the plate for Beta testing. I’ve been looking around for ages for an app that does what you have profiled on this site.
Barry:
What modules will be released when?
Is there a way for any of us to help get it to market faster?
Bill, I absolutely love what you and your team did for INTEL
can you contact me for providing similar functionality for a few of my Clients? just visit http://www.boxonline.com and put your details into the contact us page so that we can initiate a dialog.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Hi Barry,
Great progress with the plugin. We actually used this on this B&B site T House http://thousetagaytay.com
A quick question– I was wondering if the new plugin includes payment option like paypal, etc.
Thanks.
July 6th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
@Dave Q: Nice looking site. Yes, there will be an option to take full payments or deposits via PayPal (or other payment method).
July 6th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Hi Barry. Any news? Beta version that we can test?
Cheers
July 16th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Hi Barry, any news?
July 16th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Sorry, just seen your recent post… you can delete these messages if you like.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Hello Barry,
great idea! A few days ago the need of such a functionality for Wordpress arose. As always, before starting design and coding, I googled for it and…here you are!
Does there exist a sort of “preview program”? I’d like to try Staypress!
Let me know!
July 21st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Barry, this is great! Thank you, looking forward to use it; and of course, willing to pay for it since I build sites for businesses.
July 31st, 2008 at 6:10 am
looking much better now!