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Allowing customers to book resource time and/or my time.

Posted: September 4, 2012 at 12:58 pm

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Ed Beck

September 4, 2012 at 12:58 pm

I’m a photographer and I want to do two things with EE.

  1. Allow clients to schedule my time for a shoot.
  2. Allow photographers to book my studio for their use.

For example, let’s say that a photographer wants to book my studio for a shoot. I see a workflow something like:

  1. The photographer goes to my calendar to see when my studio is available. In the calendar he sees time that it’s available, time when it’s booked by another person, and time when it’s closed.
  2. They select a period of time in whole hours and submit it. EE puts a 30-min pad on each side of it and labels it “setup” and “breakdown”.
  3. After submitting they go to a payment page (PayPal, I think I have that set up in EE) where they have to send me money to book the time.

How can I do this?

thanks,

Ed Beck


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

September 4, 2012 at 5:25 pm

People have done this in the past but it’s a beast to manage. Event Espresso was never designed to be a booking system, and to do bookings, you need to create an event for every single block of time available. (Hence why it’s a beast.) You can make it a bit more manageable by enabling “Use registration limits on time slots” and adding multiple time slots for your events, but even so, you still need to have an event for every single day that you are going to have yourself or your studio available. And when you start doing that many events, you can run into other problems because of the number of events you’re running at the same time (I wouldn’t recommend, for example, creating 365 events so you have everything set up for the whole year — I would do maybe a month at a time).

With that said, yes, it’s possible and, again, it has been done. However:

1) The calendar doesn’t display whether an event is booked up or not. It will display regardless. I actually tried adding a remaining spaces line to the event in the calendar so you could see at a glance whether it was still open or not, but it just broke stuff. We may be able to add this in eventually when we look at replacing the calendar.

2) It’s not possible to add a padding like you describe to the event (unless you want to add a new event for that for every time block).

Submitting the registration form and paying via PayPal is, of course, possible and built-in to Event Espresso.

We’ve had a number of discussions about this in our developer conferences and this is a use that we’re definitely thinking about, but it will really require a whole different system to be able to manage it easily.


Ed Beck

September 4, 2012 at 9:19 pm

Thanks.

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