equipment booking system — background

This is the first in what’s going to be a series of posts documenting our equipment booking system project. We’re developers working at a library that circulates equipment (laptops, tablets, cameras, etc.) — and we’re sick of maintaining the custom PHP application that manages the reservation process. So we built the whole thing into our existing Drupal site. I say “built” because it’s done … or at least sitting on the production server waiting for content to be entered. We’re doing the documentation after the fact, so I’ll try to pick and choose what’s worth putting out there. I’m guessing that will boil down to plugging a few modules and spending way too much time writing about the PHP script we used to check for reservation conflicts. We’ll see.

The beginning of the project was deciding whether or not we wanted to use a module to manage the reservation process. Actually the beginning was MERCI— we got a little turned around on this one … picked the module and pitched it before we had everything specd out. Once we dug in, MERCI turned out to be a reasonable module but just a little heavier than what we needed. In particular, the “bucket and “resource” model was too much and it was kind of a pain to manage without being able to get into the field configurations. We also tested out Commerce Stock for its inventory tools. Way heavier than MERCI.  To use Commerce Stock we would have to install Commerce and everything that comes with it. Rather than ripping things out that we weren’t going to use (or adding more to our already overstuffed stack) we decided to build the whole thing with content types, rules and views.

No problem right?