HotelDruid

Hello,

I've just discovered your project php-residence.
It's a great project. Congratulations.

It's about a week that i'm searching over the web upon these subjects of online hotel booking.
* the Online hotel booking requests from users are growing very fast, and the amount of online sales are enormous and growing very fast.
* numerous agregators sites (hotels.com, HRS.com, booking.com etc...)
This domain is growing fastly.
=> It is now mandatory for Hotel Managers to provide an online reservation system

On the Hotel Managers point of view, there are several problems :

* Hotel mangers are not geeks (in general)
=> The system MUST be simple to use for the manager

* It is impossible to manage several systems in parallel in real time.
Now, it must have a book of reservation (a real one, or a software) in his hotel, plus, his own reservation system on his website, plus update all the agregators.
=> The system MUST update all the data of the internet at the same time when changes are made in the hotel (reservation by phone must update availabilities on the website and agregators, and a reservation taken on the website or aggregator, must appear on the "hotel book")

* The reservation system MUST be available in the hotel in all cases, even in case of lost of the internet connection. Notice that some hotels are far in the country and don't have the possibility to have an ADSL connection.
=> The system MUST be "stand-alone" in this case.

* the hotel website have to be updated directly by the manager for several reasons : change the prices, notice offers, news of the hotel, menus in case of a restaurant, ...
=> the CMS are vey usefull

So, i'm searching a system, that is running physically inside the hotel, is able to be in relation with the hotel's website, and the "agregators" websites.

On the CMS point of view, Drupal seems to be the "killer" one.
The architecture is awesome : buitl-in multilanguage, built in SEO (Search Engine Friendly), built-in triggers and events to have pre-programmed actions.
More-over "CCK" Module (Content Container Kit) manage to add properties to objects (nodes) without coding, "Views" Module manage to display data as you want, "Ubbercart" Module provide the e-commerce in an awesome ease of use for the end user in a single page check-out.
And the Drupal next version (drupal 7, in oct 2008) will be "web semantic" (called also web 3.0).
In conclusion, I think that writing a module for that CMS will be more efficient to have a stand alone script. Because the module can concentrate only on the "core" of the reservation system, without dealing with web-design theming, ecommerce, multilanguage, SEO, etc...

If you interested in discover drupal : [url]www.drupal.org[url]

My "little problem" is that, I don't know how technically to make a "stand alone" version.

What do you thing about that ?

My experience as a frustrated user is that you are almost right, however, deaaling with updates in the LAMP stack and PHP is enough to keep anyone crazy. Adding the complexities of continuous updates and security holes in Joomla and Drupal is just too much......

Those people who are doing it, or trying, have a lot more resources than Marco to throw at the problems (read cost of programs is a lot more) of keeping up to date and they still are being driven back into the corner by the snarling rats. Most of these are starting to recommend hosts with 'approved' configurations, or offering certain features only if you host it at the developer's hosting company........

I really think that the future of real applications for Drupal and Joomla is going to be one where large hosting companies who support them will get captive programmers to write these programs only for use by their customers on their servers. Some outfit that decides to focus on hotels will buy and put up a good one and support it. Someone else will focus on restaurant stuff, someone else on realestate, etc. Yes, there will be losts of new whiz-bang modules and extensions for Drupal and Joomla that people can dash off in a day's work, but the major work required for "real" apps will not be done as freeware. Anybody capable who doesn't have a personal interest in having a particular app, (like marco) will end up gravitating up to work on the prestige projects like linux, apache, joomla, or drupal...So, where does that leave you?

Understand that if you want to keep benefitting from the magnificent work that people like Marco do and have done, and donate free to the community, realize that integrating his program into your website, whether you code it by hand on Notepad or use a CMS is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. You may want to share on the forum how you did it, and offer to help others follow in your footsteps, but that part of the job is yours.

A major part of keeping the work Marco does for us possible is keeping the focus narrowed - the more of our job he has to do, the harder it is, and the less time he willl have to focus on what interests him!

Time i left the pulpit!

Indeed currently I don't feel like taking the burden of integrating with a CMS. Maybe I can change idea in the future if I can see any real examples where it can be useful, for now the ony advantage I see is having a single login instead of 2.

I don't think it's possible taking instant reservations on your website or connect to aggregators without a permanent internet connection, at least if you don't want to take the risk of overbooking. currently php-residence offers the possibility to have a "slave" copy on your local computer, so if you loose the connection you still have the data available, but without being able to update it.

Marco

Drupal is absolutely free and does not involve the payment of all downloads either. Everyone is free to enjoy the services available on the site and download programs for free use. There are individual users and web design companies, even services such as Drupal. This is useful for many.