Projects
Room Booking Plugin
One of the problems I noticed when working with Lollypop Farm's intranet site was that, while Wordpress has a huge ecosystem of plugins, very few of them are well-suited to professional business use.
Specifically, LPF needed a way to schedule resources and events, and to display those schedules, and they really needed to have that system be accessible. Users needed to be able to enter reservations and events without having to login to wordpress. This was a bit of a puzzle.
I finally decided that the world needed another wordpress plugin, in part so I could learn how to write them and become familiar with PHP in case I ever needed to use it.
What I ended up creating was a complex little beast that allows non-logged-in users, with administrative consent, to add events to custom calendars. They can even return and edit their events without logging in, due to IP and passcode security that's only feasible on internal networks.
I expect to release this plugin publicly one of these days, but it's not a high priority.
Interestingly, while one of my excuses is that it still needs some serious polishing, LPF users have taken to it like bandits. They routinely enter so many events and reservations that I have a hard time taking screenshots of the system.
Still, we think this has worked out better than a google calendar approach, or some other additional piece of software. I vastly prefer integrated solutions where possible, rather than adding new cludges that require their own attention.
