Booking

Activities ::: mod_booking
Maintained by it's meDavid Bogner, Wunderbyte LogoWunderbyte GmbH
The module is perfect for managing participants and subscription of online and offline courses and events.
Me at the Moodle Moot NZ11
Stuart Mealor
Monday, 10 April 2017, 9:05 AM
Usability
9/10
Accessibility
9/10
Technical
9/10
General comments

This Booking module has developed into a really great plugin. It can be used as a Booking form for Courses on your site, or, by changing the settings of the activity, for booking face-to-face workshops for example.

There have been a few attempts at developing other similar event booking type plugins, but this seems to be the best in terms of features and updates.

This plugin makes it easy for managing participants and subscription of online and offline courses and events.

Email confirmations can be automatically sent to the manager of the booking instance, but it might be better to be able to enter an email address rather than username (this way the booking could even be monitored by someone external).  

We've recently installed this on our public testing and development site (anyone can see this, even as a Guest!) so feel free to have a look and get a Teacher and Student experience of how this works for real  http://plugins.moodlebites.com/

Usability

East to use, with a good clean interface.  The documentation 

I could see this replacing our own Moodle site booking system (whch is based on the Feedback activity at this time).

The use of special forced user fields (profile fields) to gather additional information is a little awkward (as it's only Admin that can set this up). It could be better if Booking could be setup by Teachers with some additional 'required fields' such as Email address, Address, etc. as this plugin could then be used at commercial level as an effective Site Course Booking system.


Accessibility

This plugin adheres closely to the Moodle coding guidelines, judging by it's tightly integrated appearance and logic once installed.

The option to import CSV files (which could of course be setup in Excel, Calc, or similar first) to quickly setup multiple bookings is excellent.

There are quite a lot of settings that only Administrators can change, so I would strongly recommend that this plugin be setup by Moodle technical administrator, alongside academic staff, to ensure that the functionality is setup to best effect for Students and Teachers.

Technical

After installing (which was flawless) and testing we've found it to be both reliable and stable, with no obvious performance problems.

I certainly don't feel qualified to comment on the coding quality of David Bogner- but you can see he has developed numerous Moodle plugins !

This plugin has been actively developed since 2012, with many regular releases, which is a good sign for considering the use f any plugin.  However, do note that there is a statement that the latest version is available for Moodle 3.1 but support for future versions needs funding.