Scenario: Guest house (only 1 instance available) which can be booked per day.

Problem: The monthly calendar does not properly detect/handle overlapping bookings.

Example: Client A makes reservation from 20-2-2013 to 23-2-2013. After this booking these days are correctly shown as unavailable in the calendar. BUT: Client B can still make a reservation from 19-2-2013 to 24-2-2013! (This should not be allowed by the system!)

Or if not blocked by the system, B's reservation should be interpreted as 2 separate bookings, i.e. 19-2-2013 - 19-2-2013 and 24-2-2013 - 24-2-2013. (And it seems that at some point the system realizes that only 2 days can be booked - because the price is actually calculated only for 2 days...) Sadly the actual booking which is stored for B is from 19-2-2013 to 24-2-2013!

THIS IS COMPLETE RUBBISH! (I wonder if paying customers get something that works better than this crap!)

@ARTIO: Any comments on that?

BUG: the overview monthly-calendar view does not correctly handle days which cannot be booked (e.g. because no price has been defined for them).. they should be treated as InsensitiveDays but they are not (contrary to the booking-calendar view which handles this case correctly)

PS: The administration "Prices" entry page uses a very unintuitive date range model: normally I'd expect that the "from" and the "to" days are both included in the range. But here the "from" day does not seem to be included in the range. consequently ranges here must be defined such that they overlap (e.g. 2012-01-01 - 2012-06-27 and 2012-06-27 - 2012-12-31 <- Looking at the ranges in the example it is not obvious which of the two ranges the date 2012-06-27 belongs to.. according to the current implementation it is the former.. having overlapping ranges is just rubbish..

you are welcome :-) i would suggest that you beef up your automated web tests to ensure smooth cross platform operation in the future.

btw: actually i rather like your product and there is not much to complain about in a FREE product. BUT there are some bugs which i find rather dumb and which I would not accept in PAY product .. examples:

1) "Administration->Booking: Reservation" using this functionaliy seems rather pointless since "from/to booking interval" cannot be specified here! The resulting "reservation entry" is unusable.
2) "Reservation form filled out by customer" (the one with the "I accept the terms & conditions" checkbox): Here the client can successfully submit the reservation even after he removed ALL the "reservation interval" details.. which again leads to a useless/empty "reservation entry".
3) The time interval selection in the "Monthly calendar" (see default_calendar_monthly.php and maybe others) does not prevent the user from selecting an "inverse" interval (i.e. "end date" before "start date") which again results in a unusable 0 day reservation.

I found the bug in the "Free Booking" implementation myself - ARTIO really does not work flat out to make a good impression with its support or the quality of its implementation:

The booking.php uses non portable calls of strftime('%u', ...) - which is not implemented on Windows. Consequently the date calculation lacks an offset which leads to bullshit dates like 2012-05-33. The fix is to use the '%w' argument and adjust the 'sunday' value accordingly....


PS: What a nightmare to work with this PHP crap --- dont you guys miss a decent programming language with real IDE/debugger support....

I just downloaded the free version to try it out with my local test app.
Whenever I press the "Make a reservation" button I am getting the error:

"Failed to parse time string (2012-05-33 ..."

This looks similar to a problem which has apparently been fixed in the paid version:
www.artio.net/support-forums/booking/cus...indows-server/page-3

Have respective fixes also been integrated into the free version? And is there a point for me trying to get the modul to run with my Windows/Joomla2.5/PHP5.2.17/MySQL5.1.63/Apache2.2.22 configuration? (I tried to use the newer PHP version 5.4 but then the free booking module fails completely...)