Hi,
I run a School Holiday Program called Kraftworks for Kids. I use Joomla for our website and I use Attend Events with JEvents for handling Bookings into our program.
Firstly let me say that AE isn't designed for the use we put it to. I use it because it is a reasonable fit and it isn't expensive like the commercial reservation systems for Joomla which would be a better fit but are designed for hotels.
AE and JE installed without any problems and they are both configured easily through the Joomla Admin screens.
There are a number of features I like about AE:
It has lots of flexibility in how it handles Booking confirmations -- the page displays and emails are very good and easy to customise.
Venues are easily created and I particularly like the way Google Maps are implemented. This is really handy for first-timers.
It is very easy to set up the registration form and to customise it. We need to know things like the child's name, age, and so on. All of that is no problem with AE.
I have a couple of issues with AE. Firstly, every time you add a new Session or update an existing Session in AE it terminates the Admin session, so you have to log in again and it drops you back to the Admin Home page. This makes making updates a little frustrating. Secondly, if you Copy a Session there is no option to automatically create a new JEvent when you change the Session Date/Time. Finally, there is something wrong with the way Attend Events handles the difference between the Server Date/Time and the Local Date/Time. With Joomla configured to Australian EST (GMT + 10) the Session Date details were displayed incorrectly (showing the following day) while the Time was displayed correctly. By changing the Joomla time back to US Eastern (GMT - 5) the dates and times were stored correctly.
These issues however are not critical. They simply reduced my rating from Excellent to Good.
For a feature request I would love to see:
Resource contention handled. So if I have an All Day session and a Morning session if someone books in for All Day it also takes a slot away from the Morning session, and vice versa.
The option to allow changes to the default email configurations to overwrite existing sessions email configuration.
Regards,
Ian P.