New Monthly View - all rooms in a traditional monthly view with weeks/days of week

[cerrmj]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We are using MRBS for our church. It does what we want to help manage events happening in what rooms at the church. We want to be able to allow our church members to view the calendar, but the current monthly view for all rooms is not suitable for that purpose.

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be ideal to have a a new monthly calendar view where 'week' are the rows and the days of the week are the columns with the events scheduled in 'boxes'. The events in the boxes would need the time, description and 'room' and when you click on the event entry a pop-up box to 'view' the details (currently when not logged on and you click on an event, it takes you to a login screen). This would look almost exactly like the current "month" view for a single room - except have all rooms listed instead of just one.

Describe alternatives you've considered
We've been looking at other alternative booking systems, but we like everything rooms does for us except for a 'congregation friendly' monthly view.

Additional context
I've attached what the monthly view looks like for our church now along with a single room view which is almost what we'd like to see except have all rooms in the grid.

[campbell-m]

Thanks for your suggestion. How would you expect the results to be displayed if there were more bookings for the day than could fit in a cell (which is quite likely to happen if there are many rooms)?

[cerrmj]

Thanks for the quick reply. I think the Google Calendar handles that pretty well. If there are more entries for a single day than fits in the box, the last line in the box has a link showing how many more events "+3 more" for example. I added a screen shot of how the Google Calendar handles that. In the second screen shot, it shows what happens when you click the
"+3 more" link - it pops up all the events for the day. I would think one could have a parameter in the config file to control how many entries are shown in a box for a day until it goes into spill over mode.

Currently we have a Google calendar going as well just so we can get a congregation friendly view of what is happening at the church - but we are having to do double entry with the MRBS calendar which is difficult to manage.

We really love MRBS for keeping our room schedules and keep from overbooking and it works great for our admin person to keep track of all of the events happening where - it we can get a more friendly view of the entire calendar we can stop doing all the double entry with the Google Calendar.

I appreciate your willingness to consider this feature.

Bob.

[campbell-m]

OK, thanks, I'll mull it over - though there's a long list of things to do.

In the meantime you can avoid double entry to the Google calendar by configuring MRBS to send an email every time a booking is made, changed or deleted to a dedicated gmail address.

[hakanblom]

We are also using MRBS for our church. In production we are using a patch old version. I have made some hacks to 1.11.5 to get an monthly view with the possiblity to view one or all rooms. See:
https://mrbs.redbergskyrkan.se/index.php?view=month&view_all=1&area=-1&room=1
This site is not inproduction now.
There are still some things to fix. How could I best share these hacks?

[campbell-m]

There are still some things to fix. How could I best share these hacks?

If the changes are small then you could post a diff here. Or else you could create a fork of MRBS.

I had a look at your site. It looks like you are offering the possibility of viewing not just all rooms in an area in the month view, but also all rooms in all areas in the day, week and month views. Whilst I can see that this would work in your case, in the more general case it will cause problems when the areas have different timezones, modes (periods/times) or slot times and resolutions.

[cerrmj]

hakanblom, what you've put together looks like it would be perfect for our use! We have just one area just 9 rooms so issues with time zones and such won't affect us. The only thing that I think I'd want to tweak would be if a user wasn't logged in, clicking on an event would just pop-up an info window for the event instead of taking one to a log in screen. I'd also like to add the 'room' description in the event line in the calendar and maybe wrap the event text if necessary. I'm a programmer so I'd probably be able to build on what you've put together so far to further tweak for our ideal 'congregation facing' monthly view. I hope you can share what you've come up with so far.

[hakanblom]

I made a fork (https://github.com/hakanblom/mrbs-code/tree/main) with the the changes I think you need. Please use as you wish.

[cerrmj]

Hakanblom, I want to thank you for sharing your modifications to MRBS for the monthly calendar view. It works great as is for our purposes and solved our dilemma of having a functional month view for our congregation. and we have it in production now ( https://rooms.asburyunitedmethodist.org/index.php?view=month&view_all=1 ). THANKS!