Online visit booking for personal visits or special promotional events
The busy admissions office at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, offer a wide range of options for prospective students who want to find out what the college has to offer. To facilitate those they needed a simple online calendar that potential visitors could use to peruse the options and book a visit.
We built a system to run on the college's servers and integrate with its design templates. As well as the front end visible to the general public, we developed an administrative interface so the college staff can indicate when special events will occur, when the college is closed, or when visit options are limited due to vacations.
The system is built using PHP and utilises a number of open source PEAR libraries, particularly to generate the calendar and to keep the administrative code simple. We've built a deployment system using the ruby capistrano tool to make sure we can get new versions up and running quickly and work within the constraints of the college's server systems.
The system has been running for several years now and has undergone several refits but still serves many, many students and families every week.