Newsletter 19/8/2008

Improvements when you search for a booking

Two improvements to the Administrator/Staff page for managing bookings will make it easier for you to find the bookings that you are looking for.

The first one controls whether you find bookings from past years or not.  By default these won’t be shown – untick the box to include them.  Otherwise you see this year’s bookings and bookings from future years only.

The second improvement is a set of tickboxes for all the status values that a booking can have.  By default these are all ticked so when you are looking for a booking by name, or booking ID you don’t have to know what status it has in order to find it.  The real power of these tickboxes comes in if you leave the search field blank and click on “name” or “member number” as this lists all bookings.  Then if you then deselect some of the tickboxes, you only see the bookings that you want, for example cancelled bookings.  After you tick and untick the boxes, click on a button to see the updated results.

You can use this facility to check for ADMINEDIT bookings (thanks for feedback received on this), these are bookings that were taken back to the public screens by the Administrator in order to make changes.  If you forget to click on “finish” when doing this, the booking remains in limbo.  Use the new search facility to find these bookings, edit each one and take it back to the public screens so that you can click on “finish”.

Don’t be confused by the “INPROGRESS” bookings, these continue to show after their 15 minute lifetime, until you clear them out by selecting “clear abandoned bookings” from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.  They don’t cause problems (especially since we cleaned up a bug relating to INPROGRESS bookings last week) and when you clear them, any that are still within their 15 minute expire time won’t be deleted.

Coming Soon

When members list their bookings they will get the same “current year and future” bookings tickbox that is now in the Administrator’s page.  So they will not see last year’s bookings, unless they untick the box.  This will help avoid confusion as the years pile up.

Generalising the 2/5/7 rule, so that any day of the week can be set as valid first or last night for a booking.  This work has been done but is still being tested, so it should be with you very soon.

Changing the email that goes out after completing the booking screens.  Currently a “TENTATIVE” email goes out before the Paypal booking pages, which could be confusing if the customer reads it after they paid online.  We are changing this so the email does not go until after the payment page.  This means the booking is not in the system until a button is clicked on “page 4” whereas currently the booking becomes TENTATIVE after page 3.  The advantage is that if online payment is used, the email will show the payment made and any owing, as well as a CONFIRMED status, if appropriate.