Thread

I have a client who needs an accommodations availability section whereby users (a hotel owner, for example) will log in and be able to updating their lodging availability.

So each room they have will be a channel - with custom fields for number of occupants, amenities, etc.
But then each room (each channel) needs to be updated with availability - either vacant, tentative, or occupied, in a calendar-style format Attached is a screen shot of how the calendar part of this system works currently (this is .asp driven).

These would of course have to be searchable by site users, looking for accommodations.

I’m looking for suggestions for going about this, whether by add-ons or what - I’m not sure. All suggestions are appreciated.

I do not believe you want to give each room it’s own channel.  However, you’ll want a “rooms” channel with your custom fields, then a reservations channel with it’s own custom fields, which ties back to the rooms channel.  Another channel for who made the reservations would probably be a good start for the model.  The views on the other hand, I’m not going to be much help there.

Yeah, what I really meant was entries, not channels. Sorry, my brain is a bit fried trying to wrap my head around how to make this work.

Understood.  😊  I didn’t want you to go off and create 18 channels when you only needed one hehe

looks to me like your looking for a solid calendar app.
Check out Solspace’s calendar module:
http://www.solspace.com/software/detail/calendar/
(for now it’s 1.6 only though)

So if I downgraded to 1.6 to use Calendar, I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around how to implement this. Here’s my post from the Calendar forums, maybe you have some pointers, e-man?

http://www.solspace.com/forums/viewthread/5455/

Just brainstorming here… but your calendar would use an “event” type channel with “occupied” and “tentative” as categories (vacant as a default category) and a relationship field to tie it to a particular room.
If room 1 is occupied, say the first week of july, this would translate to an entry in the event channel spanning that week and related to room 1.
Since the calendar module uses the default weblog you can probably output this any way you want, though it may not be exactly the same as your example above.
There’s probably other ways as well but this is off the top of my head.

So, would each day that is either vacant or open, be it’s own entry? That seems like it would be very cumbersome to keep updated, but maybe I’m just thinking about it all wrong.

You can create events that span dates using the module. Like I said, it’s just one approach, YMMV 😊