Recently I had to look into either using a third-party booking plug-in (for renting properties), or writing my own. I became apparent to me that there were not many plug-ins out there that added this functionality to Wordpress. The ones that I found were usually lacking in quality and features.
I am creating a Wordpress plug-in that will be feature rich, and easy to use. My goal is to turn Wordpress into a booking system that can be used for booking the use of anything from holiday properties to rental cars.
So far I’ve created a few custom MySQL tables to store the bookings data, and a few plug-in pages. I’m at verion 0.1, so early days.
I’ve worked on a booking system before, in ASP.NET, so doing it for Wordpress shouldn’t be too hard.
The features I would like to include are:
- Ability to set-up plug-in to use Wordpress database, or secondary database
- Themes – the booking form visible to the public can have a different look and feel, set via the admin area.
- Custom themes – create a custom themes folder and tell the form to use that instead.
- Overview Calendar – Overview of all bookings, filtered by booking type (i.e. rooms, cars, etc.).
- Payment for bookings via PayPal (possibly Google kart as well?)
- Two different users, admin (full access), and gatekeeper (approve bookings).
Some screen-shots so far (nothing exciting yet, but watch this space!).
I have created a custom menu, with a “View Bookings” overview page. I’m currently adding a booking detail page, which will be accessible by clicking the “Booked Item” link. The first menu item links to a settings page, but doesn’t do much yet.
When I get to version 1, I’ll create a demo wordpress site. This is going to be fun 
[Update: 25 Nov 2009]
Well folks, time for a progress update 
I have created a booking form and the booking detail page (Now I can make a booking for an item, and it appears in the booking summary table). They are still works in progress, but I do not want it to look as though the projects dead in the water by not posting updates! Anyway – here are a few more screen-shots:
Hi
I have been searching for a plugin in like this. How’s it coming along? Let us know if you want a hand. Would be willing to beta or even alpha test it for you
Cheers
Huw
Hi Huw,
It’s coming along quite well thank you. I’ve got all the base functionality there (it saves a booking and you can view the booking details). It just doesn’t look very pretty, and doesn’t do things like email or item (i.e. room) editing.
There is no strict deadline, but I hope to have something ready for beta testing just before Christmas. Would be great if you would like to test it.
I will let you know nearer the time.
Cheers,
Henrik
This would be very useful for my local club. To enable poeple to Book courts online and take payments. If you can allow people to specify time slots when configuring taht’d be awesome and also make it so that only members can book you’ll be on to a winner!! Keep up the good work!
Almost forgot about booking times – I’ll make sure that I include that as well. Also members only bookings sounds like a good idea – shouldn’t be too difficult
Cheers!