Drupal Developers: Your Room is Ready

After a few months of hard work, the first public code of Drupal Rooms has been released into the wild. We're so excited to share this with the community and hope you'll all check out what we hope will be the start of a really innovative Drupal module! Here's some background on our new contribution and how you can get involved.

How the Idea Sparked

This idea came about like many Drupal contributions - a client needed it. A small european hotel chain was interested in a drupal-based booking engine and given that several of us had prior experience building sites & systems for this market, we saw the opportunity to not only deliver for our client, but to do even more. After reviewing existing modules on Drupal.org that could at least partly match our needs, the Bluespark development team boiled it down to the following options:

• cobble something together using pre-existing "close-enough-but-not-really" modules,
• use a third party solution and deal with systems integration woes,
• build a contrib module ourselves, and do it the right way.

Given how our company works and that none of the current options were anywhere near fulfilling our needs, the choice was pretty easy. Working via an existing collaborative partnership with Ronald Ashri of Istos, this little idea quickly became a project the Bluespark Labs team was passionate to push forward.

Rooms Today...

Admins can define bookable units (rooms for now, soon to be anything else under the sun) and pricing, then manage room availability through a simplified interface. Clients, meanwhile, can search your available rooms, make a selection and check out. Check out our screencast below to get the full skinny on what's there right now. What's really cool is that we have a very easily customizable booking system, that also integrates with Drupal Commerce.

... and Tomorrow

We are by no means done, this is only our first step into all that Rooms could potentially deliver. We're deep into ideas for this project, and we're ready for contributors to dive in and join the movement. The code has been built in a semi-abstract way, so we foresee using it in lots of different ways. You'll have to get on board to hear more about where we're taking this -- all I'll say is, there is opportunity for some really clever additions!

Getting in on the action:

1. Watch the screencast above. 2. Browse drupalrooms.com 3. Browse the project page & issue queue. 4. Download Rooms and give it a try :) 5. Submit feedback & feature requests to the issue queue. 6. Contact the tech leads to help out even more. We look forward to collaborating with the Drupal community on this exciting new project!