Hello good people of VHS,
Recently, the IT committee updated the booking system. We were running a customized fork of Easy!Appointments an open source booking tool, and we’ve moved to using the official version from the developers. While the update makes some cool improvements possible, and simplifies our server infrastructure, it has made a couple things worse. I want to take a moment to update y’all on the upsides and downsides, and ask for some help!
Benefits:
- Public calendar - probably the number one request i’ve heard for the booking system is a calendar view of when the laser is booked. the old version of easyappointments didn’t have this feature, the new one does! I am still fiddling with the configuration to get this working, but it’s coming!
- Easier deployment, and less custom code - the previous version relied on code that nobody active at the space understood, while the new setup is using a pre-baked and actively maintained docker image from easyappointment’s developers.
Issues:
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Cross-midnight bookings - our previous fork had been modified to allow bookings to start on one day and end on the next. We’ve lost that by switching forks. You can book 11pm to midnight, and then a separate booking from midnight to 1am, but you can’t book 11pm to 1am.
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59 minute bookings - because the system can’t handle bookings that cross midnight, it was impossible to book a 60min booking starting at 11pm. I’ve worked around this by making all our “1 hour” bookings 59minutes long. The downside of this is that all bookings that come after a 59min booking are 1min earlier. See how in the screenshot below it goes 1:45 PM to 5:44 PM. Annoying! Potentially confusing!
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Data reset - when we re-deployed, we decided to start from scratch rather than port over the data from the previous install. I recreated all the booking types that I could see were in use (welding, wood cnc, laser). If your area’s booking is missing, please let me know and I can re-create it.
Request for help:
- Easy!Appointments - If anyone is interested, and has some php skillz, it would be awesome if we could get a fix for the midnight-crossing issue added to the official fork of this. If you’re able and interested, come say hi in the #vhs-dev-ops channel on slack. More context in the github repo of our fork.
- Nomos and the Website/Wiki - While I have your attention, we are getting close to pushing an update to the wiki/website, and there’s a bunch of almost-finished improvements to nomos coming. The IT committee handles the servers and deployment, but I’d like to gather a separate group of people interested to work on the content of these. That could be programming, but it could also be just organizing the wiki, fixing styling, updating out of date info, etc. If you’re interested, please come say hi in the #vhs-dev-ops channel on slack. I will be posting more about this as the need for help gets more urgent, but now is your chance to get in on the ground floor of the coolest new group at vhs!
