Bookings, Appointments, Reservations and Rentals

Its a decent system, only big downfall is you cant edit the form it comes with, if we could use gravityforms in place that would be great.

@matteclipse - that is astonishing news, I presumed you were just basing your endorsement on their demo, sorry.

If you have a working example, would you be willing to share the URL with us?

I would be very grateful because, as I said, I've been following this niche for years and, until now, never came across anyone who had actually bought that plugin, I would really appreciate the chance to see what it is capable of in a real-world situation.

I have made a reservation system with Woocommerce, GF and The Events Calendar Pro and will need some beta testers soon if anyone on this thread is interested in having a look through the code (my first site, so definitely open to suggestions)

--Multiple Vendor setup
--Custom payment gateway integration not currently available for any wp ecommerce plugin
--Automated onsite ticketing and payments for customer-to-vendor interactions

@jomac - For a tour booking site have you thought of using a cart plugin such as JigoShop, coupled with the excellent Advanced Custom Fields?

You can set up each tour as a product and use ACF to create your itinerary and custom content, and of course stock levels to control inventory to stop over selling tours.

For ages we've been trying to find a solution to charge people to pay TO post (not to be confused with pay PER post) and then charge them an annual fee to publish their post for a further year, and the solution we've found is to use JigoShop. It's not just for selling products, we can use it to programatically create a posts for our users to populate (they can create and edit their post but they can't publish them until they're approved), and we use it to remind them their listing (post) is due to expire so they can pay to renew using JigoShop.

We can also use it to sell featured listings and to prevent overselling spots on our site we can limit the featured posts to say 8, by simply adding a stock level.

I agree with @donacha, I don't see Gravity offering a solution for bookings any time soon. Unless I am missing something vital, I cannot see the point in Gravity Charge if it's just another content membership and digital download solution.

Has anyone tried WPMUDEV's new Appointments + plugin? I would love an honest review of it. Here's the announcement and features list:
http://wpmu.org/wordpress-appointments-plugin/

++1

OK, I guess I have to pipe in here. Understandably, a comprehensive scheduling application is a monstrous undertaking, and there are many developers (not WP developers) who are at least on the curve, if not ahead of it.

We use GF on at least a hundred domains, and we're using CheckFront on a few for booking. It's reliable and feature-rich, but expensive with little front-end customization.

Perhaps the best interim (or even final) solution Team GF, would be to partner with a company like vCita and provide hooks into GF, as Fast Secure Contact Form has.

This way, you can appease the masses who absolutely require this feature, yet remain focused on the forms aspect and the new gig Carl eluded to. See? The best of both worlds - GF, the best form software combined with a really nice scheduling application.

If we're happy, you're happy. Right?

@ donnacha

Couldn't agree more however, since I haven't found a robust, non-hosted, feature-rich owned software (one that runs on our servers), yet the need remains, at the very least, tying GF into an existing system might make better sense than having no solution at all. Particularly if GF negotiated a member discount (vCita isn't that expensive - at least not yet), if they truly have no roadmap to build such a featureset anytime in the near future.

+ 1346 votes for this.

Been trying to come up with something over the last few days that doesn't cost $200+ per year (and actually works).

@donnacha -- can I ask what you consider controversial about WPMUDev?

I've just signed up with them on their monthly plan, to see if some of their plugins will suffice for myself and some of my clients.

After what I'd spent this year on products from a different WordPress theme shop, I think mine and my clients' money would have been better serviced by me signing for with WPMUDev for a year instead.

@Jamie M - I've tried pretty much every solution out there, some costing far more than $200, cost would not be much of an issue if there was something that actually worked - Web designers everywhere, in every country, are being forced to pass up on potential work because, very simply, we don't have the tool we need to fulfill a common and obvious need.

The problem with the horrendously expensive one is that, like you, all anyone seems to have ever tried is the free version which, with its limited features, works okay ... but ... no-one really knows if the more complex version even exists, there are no real-world businesses using it - for a plugin that has been around for as long as this, that is very, very suspicious.

I would leap gratefully at the chance to pay the $999 per site if I could find any evidence that it works but no-one has been able to get any sort of response from the anonymous owner of that website. The badly written English alone gives you a clue that this might not be a real business, earning real money.

The truth about plugin pricing is that, when a good booking plugin is finally created, the owners will soon realize that they have a hit on their hands and will maximize their earnings by pricing it relatively competitively - for instance, a few people would undoubtedly pay $999 a year for a Gravity Forms Developer license, but about 50x more will pay the $199 they do charge.

The only reason to make a plugin crazily expensive is that you have a product that does not work well enough to survive mainstream scrutiny or it is so buggy that there is no way you could provide support to more than a handful of customers, so, instead, you try to net the occasional rich fool and bet on the likelihood that they won't complain loudly or publicly enough for the next rich fool to notice.

Hmm, they do have 12,000+ fans on Facebook. That's actually quite a lot...

LOL

Hi. I dip in and out of this forum every so often. I am a huge fan of Gravity Forms and employ them on most of my websites.

Like everybody here I am constantly looking for the holy grail of booking plugins. I have actually been using the premium version of Online Booking Calendar for a charity website. See http://www.carersholidays.org.uk/booking/cotswolds/

It was the best solution I could find after a lot of research and testing. It does do the vast majority of what is required. There was an upgrade to the plugin in functions and interface a few months ago. I have to say that I have found the customer service to be very good and responsive. When we had a PayPal issue a few months ago they even undertook liaison with PayPal in UK for me. Their written English is not wonderful but I find that they usually understood any concerns I was raising. The website for this plugin is up: http://wpbookingcalendar.com

If anybody wants to find out more or to see screen grabs of the back end I would be happy to oblige. http://www.123design.co.uk/contact/

I would, however, still like GF to do something in this area as I love their methods and interface.

Hi Donnacha, I have also replied to you personally. Here are my replies to your questions:
•I did have email conversations with them when I was experimenting with the free version but maybe it was because I was clear that I was definitely interested in purchasing for the organisation
•You can display calendars for a few months or years. It is set to 2 months at the moment as the season has ended and new prices have to go up for next season.
•The availability does work but there is no availability at the moment. It will start again February.
•The calendars are clickable.
•The emails are automated for deposits and full payment can be automatically calculated, but a human has to approve the booking and then trigger the request for final payment. Unfortunately, Carers are unable to use the full facilities of the plugin as their pricing structure is so complicated and one price has no correlation with another. You have to have percentage relationships between prices for it all to work. The system works with PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, Sage Pay and iPay88. Unfortunately, not WorldPay. With PayPal you can do Instant Payment Notification.
•The system will not allow you to book a date and facility that is already booked. There is one problem of booking in and out dates which I am not sure is a problem of the plugin but rather that of the complicated set-up of Carers – they have different start days for different lengths of time.
•The extra usefulness of this plugin is in the back end for administrators – you can see how the bookings are going and you can enter specific notes on the booking or the client. Also, you can print out from the bookings and export to Excel and then sort your info. You will see that Carers ask quite a few questions when people are filling in their form – all this info gets exported to a spreadsheet which is invaluable for their marketing. It is this back-end stuff that I don't believe can be done (at least not by me) in Gravity.

If there are any more questions I can help with I will be very pleased. Thanks also for your suggestion of putting this info on my site. You always tend to denegrate your own knowledge:)

@JaniceTye

Janice, thanks so much for sharing your detailed analysis with us, that will be useful to so many people.

You clearly have a thorough understanding of their product and the mere fact that, even after having used it so much, you are still happy with it, well, that is a convincing endorsement and, as soon as I have the time, I will make a more determined effort to establish contact with the developer.

Again, thank you - the time you freely gave to share your experience will help so many people who are struggling to solve this problem.

@donnacha

Good point on the annual fee for updates... realistically though, I doubt I will ever pay for updates. If the product is solid enough, I'm more than happy to make compatibility changes myself. I have also had several conversations with the dev and I expect the renewal fee will go just as soon as he has a steady flow of new customers (he is trying to earn a living with just this one product after all).

On the flip side and keeping some perspective, the renewal fee is half a nights accommodation in an average booking - and far less that all the booking systems that charge a %.

Will let you know how it all works out.

I would love the ability to take online service reservation in 2 hour windows on my website for my plumbing company. I have had GF for a few years now and I have been looking for a booking solution.

After reading 3 pages of no real solid answers I want to know what would it take to have this made?

I will pay someone to make an add-on to gravity forms that will allow me to take bookings online in gravity forms, and send out a invoice with freshbooks for the appointment fee.

I don't want to own the rights to the add-on, or a % of the resale of the script to others... I just want to use it and pay someone to finally make one that works for my business needs.

@Hendo604

Yeah, this thread is now 3 pages long with no real solid answers ... but that is the whole point! The day that a decent, minimal, well-coded booking solution appears, we can all go home and live happily ever after :)

@alsc, that would be fantastic if you could tie together Google Calendar + GF. One of the missing elements in GF is this type of robust scheduling/calendar support. I see that as one of the biggest challenges to a booking system. Then you can deal with things like inventory (number of possible booking slots per time period), or even table assignments (for restaurants).

It would be great if you could use Google Calendar data to inform a GF, so for instance certain days that are completely booked wouldn't be available for selection on the GF. Very curious to see the potential results! Thanks.

Whew... just read this whole thread start to finish.... THAT'S how bad I want a good appointment/reservation plugin. Thank you Donnacha and others for all your time invested in this thread.

I want to note, that IMHO: Appointments, Reservations and Events are all very different things handled best by SEPARATE plugins.

At least in my lexicon:

Appointments

Reservations

Events

I'm going to check out easyReservations, unfortunately for hourly reservations I need to buy the premium version which is €119/yr (~US$150). If it really does what I need, that's cheap, but like Donncha I've been burned so many times in this space I'm gun shy.

For GF, I'd LOVE a SIMPLE add-on like Donncha described. Just a simple a way to show an availability calendar (with available times or days) that could be picked from. Bonus if it's a visual calendar and works like Tungle.me did. I'd use it instantly as a replacement for Tungle.me, I'd use it for many of my small private practice type clients...

I have a site I'm working on for an aesthetician and am configuring http://simplybook.me/ for her. It seems to be a good option for a single provider or small business. Does anyone have any experience with this plugin?

@lkraav - As an opportunity, booking/reservations is the only remaining truly huge unfilled need in the WordPress landscape.

The business model mistake that most companies seem to make is that they provide yet another SaaS solution, because they fear that distributing their code will result in piracy. That is simply the wrong problem to worry about.

To address this very specific market - providing booking/reservations capability to the army of people running their businesses on WordPress (there are currently 60m WordPress sites, at current growth it will be 100m by mid-2014) - it needs to be a "real" plugin, not a fake plugin that merely frames a service that could disappear over night.

Just to be clear, and it needs to be restated because, even in this thread, people keep bringing up ridiculous service-based booking plugins, no sane developer will EVER risk his reputation on booking code he has no access to, a business he has no control over or transactional pricing that will inevitably rocket. That is a recipe for disaster, distressed clients and hundreds of hours of unpaid fire-fighting work in the future.

Gravity Forms is a good example of why a plugin need to contain the actual functionality - they could have created an online form builder, but that would never have been adopted and evangelized by serious WordPress developers, would never have gained momentum and would not, today, be the dominant player.

I say that piracy is the wrong problem to worry about because, quite simply, in the context of WordPress developer tools, that problem has been solved - the convenience of immediate updates to a continually improving tool that you actively use, on websites you earn money from or have been paid for, always outweighs the cost. Sure, there are ways to work around it, it isn't hard to find pirated versions of popular plugins, but no-one whose time is worth money will continue to do that for long and especially not for serious sites.

Gravity Forms seeded their market by giving early adopters lifetime developer licenses - before becoming firmly established, this great deal compensated for the risk that the developers might be wasting their time learning a plugin that might not be around in a few years. This consideration would apply even more to a booking/reservations plugin.

They then surged sales by letting it be known that this lifetime license would be discontinued within a month. By the time they switched to annual licenses, Gravity Forms had become the forms plugin that "everyone" used.

You say that you have developer capability but, actually, the more important capability is to have at least one person in your company that is smart enough to grasp the need for simplicity and stubborn enough to keep fighting for it. That is not as easy as it sounds, even skilled developers are prone to additive thinking and, if you look at the existing WordPress booking plugins that come close to being usable, such as EasyReservations, they fail because they got lost on the way to that simple goal.

@nutsandbolts

Great post, thank you for linking to your implementation of that script and, yes, it is exhausting trying to find well-designed scripts.

For anyone else following this thread, I'll give my analysis of StivaSoft and their products. They are a Bulgarian company with large number of offshore coders, many in Vietnam.

The StivaSoft product model is to take various specialized functions - such as online booking, calendars, directories - and squeeze them into several different, narrowly-niched products, baking in features that limit the situations in which each script can be used - it is as if Gravity Forms was split into several different products i.e. "A Form for Contacting Priests", "A Form for Leaving Website Feedback", "A Form for Ordering Cakes" etc . This is pretty much the opposite of what we are all praying for: a simple, flexible booking engine that we, ourselves, can customize to suit our actual needs in many different situations ... but, at this stage, most of us will accept anything that we can somehow shoehorn into our sites.

The StivaSoft financial model is to capture as many customers as possible by being in as many niches as possible. As nutsandbolts points out, their Appointment Scheduler script is pretty good ... BUT ... I did notice a few things about the company as a whole that set my alarm bells ringing:

1. The pricing is reasonable enough: in the long run, you will probably need the more expensive developer version of the script because you will almost certainly need to make tweaks to the script and the cheaper version is encoded, but a hundred or so dollars is not too bad ... HOWEVER ... as a company, they seem to be heavily geared towards selling their coding services. If you look in their forums, many users request WordPress integration and the answer is generally "We can code that for you, contact us privately for a price quote". Now, I accept that special customization should cost money but my overall impression is that the company is taking advantage of the fact that most people are so desperate for a booking solution that they don't think through what, exactly, their clients will need and end up paying a lot more than the original price on "special" customizations that the company wrote long ago and have already sold to hundreds of customers.

2. I cannot find good examples of their scripts in real-world use; even in the portfolio of client examples of each script, most appear to be broken, abandoned or just look absolutely terrible. Questions in the forum about how to get scripts looking as good as their demos are, again, met with the stock answer "We can code that for you, contact us privately for a price quote". The simple lack of presentable client sites makes me wonder if they ask for so much that no-one ever takes it any further. As it happens, nutsandbolts has the best-looking integration I have seen of that particular script, but other users in the forums seems to be struggling with various issues.

3. If you Google around, you can find a number of searing complaints about StivaSoft's behavior - the general gist seems to be that they are very responsive when you are asking pre-purchase questions and, after purchase, are also prompt to reply but the replies tend to be along the lines of "That is not a feature of this script ... but we can code it for you, contact us for a price quote". Now, bear in mind, every company has haters somewhere online, you cannot believe everything you read, but this does seem to fit with overall impression I got from the forums.

An example of the sort of functionality that, say, a vacation rentals site would need but which might not occur to most designers when they make their original purchase, and which are not included in the basic Vacation Rentals Script, would be:

A) A way to specify DIFFERENT minimum stay lengths for different periods - absolutely essential in the context of vacation rentals: you might be willing to take on the hassle of a one-night stay during an ordinary week, but you don't want to waste your weekend on anything less than a 3-night booking and, for Christmas/New Year, you'll probably want to hold out for bookings of at least one week.

B) A way for property owners to view and edit an availability calendar for each property, allowing them to quickly black out dates that have been booked through a third-party system such as Airbnb. Again, essential.

C) A way to set a base price, a base weekend price (and to specify what days you consider to be weekend) and, then, on top of that, the ability to specify date ranges of any length during which different weekday and weekend prices apply AND, also, an easy calendar interface that allows the owner to enter different prices on a day-by-day basis. Otherwise, your owners will face a nightmare of repetitive data-entry, errors and confusion.

If you are lucky, StivaSoft have this stuff already coded, ready to sell to you as a "special customization". If you are unlucky, these features are beyond their coding abilities and they are, anyway, already making enough money from original sales and easier customizations that they can sell to an endless stream of desperate customers, all of whom will ultimately run up against the same roadblocks and have to abandon the script.

HAVING SAID THAT, the Appointment Scheduler script that nutsandbolts is using does seem to have nailed that very specific use case, I just wouldn't hold my breath waiting for additional features such as Stripe payment integration, and I certainly wouldn't expect them to be cheap.

A better option for that specific use case, although I don't have personal experience of it, might be wpmudev's Appointments+ plugin, which costs $19, is not encoded and can be used on as many sites as you want. As far as I can see, the only minus is that it only accepts payments via PayPal, whereas Appointment Scheduler also has Authorize.net as an option. Judging by their forums, wpmudev aren't particularly good at responding to user feature requests, but I reckon they probably have the edge on StivaSoft and, of course, they are 100% WordPress focused. Oh, and they also say that they are working on a general bookings / reservations plugin.

Worth noting: with StivaSoft, you can start with the cheaper one-site, encoded version of any script and upgrade later to the multiple site, unencoded version, paying only the remaining difference in price. Also, buying one script gets you another of the same value or less for free.

If anyone has used any related plugins - StivaSoft, wpmudev or ANY company - please do share your experiences with us here on this thread.

Oh, that's funny, I was just testing Appointments+, out of curiosity, and it does seem to have problems with my theme!

I submitted a few customization queries to StivaSoft myself, to test my racket hypothesis, they haven't replied yet but your experience confirms it: that is an absolutely outrageous upsell, timezone awareness is an obviously necessary feature and as for having a developer do it, nonsense, they clearly would have been asked about this thousands of times, they already have the code and, even if they did not, it would not take more than a few minutes to do. Also, your day of the week suggestion, as someone embedded in the culture that most of their customers come from, that is something they should be thanking you for, not charging you.

Bearing in mind that the per-hour cost of a freelance developer in Bulgaria or Vietnam is $10 - $20, how much did they quote you?

As they seem to be forcing the upgrade, it would be justifiable for you to throw in with a couple of other people from this thread, if they are interested - you've already paid the first $59, perhaps a couple more people might contact you via your website and offer to put $50 each towards the remaining $100. All three of you would also have access to the developer version of another one of their scripts too.

Whilst Gravity is busy creating really useful Add-ons such as Quizzes, this just came up on my radar:

http://bookings-plus.com/

It looks promising but no info about the developers and a whois for the website reveals it was registered anonymously by proxy.

I have now tested the free version of Bookings+ and, despite the name, it is only an appointments plugin and not a good one.

The free features are very basic and the interface is complicated by menu items that lead only to gaudy ads informing you that "This is a premium feature, subscribe now!".

It is clear, looking at the layout and menus, that even the paid version is far less sophisticated than other WordPress Appointments plugins.

I am more familiar with booking plugins but I did happen to do a side-by-side comparison with an established Appointments plugin, costing $19 for unlimited domains, which was miles ahead in every respect: admin interface, features, documentation and the polish of the resulting calendar.

I can't recall if you all already covered this one, but it's worth another look. They have a working demo, and 8 or so video tutorials. I haven't given it a test run yet but for Appointment Bookings it doesn't look half bad. Would like to see if anyone out there as given this one a go?

http://wp-online-booking-system.com/

GZA is absolutely right, just another scam, and a particularly devious one: claims to be a 2.0 version when, in fact, there has never been a 1.0 version, this plugin is only 2 months old, while the website and twitter account have only been around since Christmas Day.

What is most worrying about these recent plugins is that their marketing is so well written. We are experienced enough to go through the claimed features and realize that free or far cheaper plugins do more, but one thing I've learnt through client work is that most people are clueless and will be vulnerable to scams as well-constructed as this.

Just to clarify, the plugin itself seems to work but I call this a scam because the website seeks to deceive and charges ridiculous amounts for a limited and unproven plugin: $147 for use on ONE domain and 1 week of email support, $849 for use on 5 domains, and no refunds under any circumstances!

I suspect we might be seeing the beginning of a trend, whereby hardcore marketers are using every selling trick in the book to push hit-and-run plugins that do no more than free or cheaper alternatives and protecting themselves from the inevitable backlash by remaining anonymous.

With a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that this one is being sold by London-based Israeli web design, social media and SEO "expert" Daniel Zairi. His web designs all seem to be Themeforest themes and 2 of his clients' sites that I checked had no meta tags, hilarious.

@gravsa411

Unfortunately, bookfresh is just another plugin that simply iframes an online subscription service, taking security, privacy, control and costs out of your (and your client's) hands.

As for the chances of a GF booking product, well, it appears that Gravity Charge may finally be released into beta sometime this quarter, with a full release in Q2. We've got to presume that the first few versions of Charge will require a lot of support and fire-fighting, and then they'll presumably need a decent break before embarking on any new projects.

So, the question is whether, towards the end of this year, when they get clear of all that other stuff, they perceive WordPress bookings as a potentially lucrative enough niche to start working on. It might seem obvious to us that it would tie in really well with the work they've already done in forms, in payment systems and, of course, Carl expressed an interest in this thread less than two years ago, but you can never tell what choices people will actually make.

For instance, I was genuinely surprised when they revealed their Gravity Charge plans, the potential is not as obvious to me, so, my hunch is that they're probably not going to target something so obvious as bookings anytime soon, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

@GZA - I came across that info in another thread in this forum, you should be able to find it by searching "gravity charge". The poster was not one of the GF guys but he was so specific about the timeframe, I presume he picked it up from a tweet, podcast or some blog, I don't pay enough attention to WordPress chatter these days.

Then again, perhaps he was working from old information, I know that it was originally meant to come out around the beginning of 2012, perhaps I've got my wires crossed.

I, too, have no idea what features Charge will include, I presume the delay has been precisely because there are so many skilled and, now, deeply entrenched competitors in that broad niche, their release has been continually pushed back because they need to come up with something that truly stands out.

I'm not sure that leveraging the position of GF will be enough - yes, they will get a rush of early purchases from existing GF users, particularly if they stick with the plan to offer them a good discount, but that trust only increases the pressure to provide a clear improvement on what is already available or risk tarnishing their overall reputation. I mean, the delay already looks pretty bad and there is very little buzz about it, no obvious demand, they need to really hit it out of the park, I'm not convinced that the niche is lucrative enough to support a slew of roughly equivalent contenders.

I'm just sad that they didn't just go where the big money is, bookings, while it remained uncontested, before Woo and WPMUdev started to mobilize, they could have owned that space in the same way that they own forms, they could have locked it in, and then used that as a strategic base from which to mop up digital downloads and other small niches.

@GZA - For sure, the scammers and chancers are well aware of the demand because, if you think about it, their "job" is to identify and reflect demand. This thread is hidden from the Web, accessible only to registered customers, but I repeatedly come across the same desperate demand throughout the Web, sometimes tied to WordPress, sometimes other CMSes, sometimes just demanding any booking solution at all and, as such, everyone ends up wasting huge amounts of time on scammy "solutions" designed to trap the unwary, the foolish and the impatient.

Sadly, almost the entire software industry is based upon selling "pig in a poke" solutions, while the few genuinely skilled and honest coders tend not to be tuned into customers want or, at least, not past a certain initial level of success and comfort.

With sufficient skills and patience, it is possible to cobble together working solutions, as you did with ACF and Jigoshop, and as an increasing number of people are doing with Toolset, Pods etc. True, Gravity Forms is no longer at the cutting edge but it is financially successful and will remain fondly regarded by many as the first truly polished tool that made it easy for normal folks to do advanced things with WordPress.

A company having both technical genius AND the longterm ability to remain tuned into what their customers really want, and to have the drive to keep advancing into new areas, that is truly rare, that would be a Steve Jobs level phenomenon, and it would be unfair to expect that level of sustained focus from Gravity Forms or any small company.

@David Peralty - yes, agreed, I did not mean to suggest that Gravity Forms is not still crushing it in their specific niche.

The reason why we users, most of us professional integrators, hoped that they would keep moving forward and expand into bookings is that the GF ethos already comes so close to the simple, minimalistic but extensible approach that would be required to make bookings a functionality we could credibly offer our clients, and we experience the untapped demand for that every day in the form of jobs we have to turn down. It kills us that GF is already so close, and yet so far away.

It is a good thing, in many ways, that the GF guys continue to focus upon improving their core product, which we all benefit from, but I do also believe that most good coders have a blind-spot for opportunities, especially when they are too big and too obvious. Springboarding off the success of Gravity Forms, they have clearly invested a lot of energy, capital and over a year of hard work into their next product, something to do with digital downloads. I am sure it will be excellent, and I do understand the synergies with their existing work on payment gateways etc, but I can't help thinking that is a relatively small and already well-served market. I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times I have been asked to deliver such a site whereas, with truly flexible booking functionality, I could walk into a 100 different businesses within a square mile of my office and walk out from each with a contract, and that doesn't even begin to touch on all the online projects that would also suddenly become possible.

As I say, however, I don't blame GF for not leaping upon the opportunity, I genuinely understand how hard it is to follow up on a big initial success, and no other major WordPress house has tackled it either. I just hope that hungry, ambitious new coders might come across this thread and realize that, incredibly, the most lucrative and commercially useful niche in WordPress plugins is still wide open, and all they need is the arrogance to believe they can own it and the discipline to not overcook it.

Just subscribing to this thread.

two yeaar later wich system do you choose for booking appointment with gravity forms ?

Hi,

I think that the problem is that it is not so easy to develop. In 2007 I started a booking system for a hotel and because of many things it resulted in a bad product not able for the masses as I would like.

If it was so easy some of us will hired a developer or started the project ourselves (again, in my case...). Someone has asked here for a quote and never has been answered; maybe it is a symptom of the problem.
As a developer, every customer tells me "it so easy, you only need to..." and "make it cheep, coders always have got that magical peace of code in a drawer and copy-paste it is more easy than you try to explain to me". And then, the projects are not what both parts expect and in cases like this, we see a lot of scamers and a very few projects doing things not as well as expected.

So, saying that, I encourage you to do the hard work with the aim that someone with enough skills starts doing something well in benefit of all us.

THE REQUISITES

We all know what a booking system needs and we all know how it should work. But really we all not know anything (trust me! ;D) so, please, start writing everything we need.

Also, write some user cases. This is useful to detect inconsistencies between what the customer asks for and what we need to develop really.

Please, please, please, explain clearly if this is a booking system for hotels, restaurants, for all of them... Maybe it would be for everyone, but we must do the effort to be clear on what we want and what we need, so write your thoughts near each requisite or user case.

TECHNOLOGY

Many of us think on a Wordpress plugin, but why not a Drupal plugin, or a custom development? Lets talk about this also.

THE ROAD MAP

Be realistic, what you need first? At the end of the list you can dream -dreams are possible!-.

THE LICENSE

GPL? A dual licensed code? What would be the best for that project?

THE BUSINESS MODEL

Oh, yes, you should write this also. We need that someone thinks: oh, I can do this and I will start right now!!! So you, real business people, experienced booking-related project managers, tell the world how do you think it would be the best business model (in this forum there are som ideas, maybe we can copy-paste them to start working).

THE MARKETING TIPS

Why not? You talked about crappy SEO-names. Ok, tell us how YOUR PLUGIN should be named ;).

ANYTHING ELSE?

Of course, you can add anything you think that could be interesting for such project.

HANDS ON

I've created a Google Drive folder with a doc inside to start talking about this, if you want: http://bit.ly/BookingsSecretProject The folder is not completely public, only those who have got the link can view and edit its contents.

Hopefully do you think that all this is useful ;D.

I believe that if there is a true interest on moving on this kind of project, we will see this here.

If any developer, team or business starts something upon this, please, tell something in that forum or write a comment in the doc so anyone could be in contact with you to ask for information or for give you some help.

PS: please, Gravity-team, allow people to subscribe topics without the need to write a comment :).

Keep in touch!
--
David