Creating Rooms

As described in the overview article, the Room Booking feature helps your users/patrons to fully utilize your facilities by providing details on the spaces available for their use, and the ability to request bookings for these spaces.

Considerations before creating rooms

Site Labels and Filter Vocabularies

Your Stacks site is highly customizable, including the ability to update almost all field names and site labels. This allows you to ensure field names and other terminology matches what your users/patrons expect to see when viewing the room details.  

When users/patrons are viewing the list of rooms, and if you have many rooms/spaces available, options are available that allow them to filter/group the list of rooms. These options are called Filter Vocabulary fields, they are customizable drop-down fields populated with your own list values. Users/patrons will see the list options that they can use to filter the room list by. There are no default values in either of these lists, so it can save you time in the long run to create these list values before you start creating the rooms.

Filter vocabularies and site labels are discussed in more detail in the Considerations for Creating Content article.

Easy Forms

Stacks already provides a basic form that is used by your users/patrons to submit room bookings; this includes information including First and Last Name, Email, and PhoneNumber as well as other fields as described in the Booking Settings article. However, if you have a need to capture more information above and beyond what the default form captures, you can add a custom-built EasyForm to the booking process for individual rooms.

Consider what additional information you may require and build the form to include with your room bookings. Form more information on how to create a form, please see the article Creating Easy Forms.

Creating Rooms

1. From the Dashboard, click the Bookings Management tile
2. Click the Rooms tile
3. Click + Add Room
   1. Title - enter a title (name) for the room
      1. This is how patrons will identify the room they wish to book
   2. Body - enter any applicable information related to the room, for example, this could include amenities or equipment in the room that can be used
      1. See the WYSIWYG editor article for more information on formatting options and field functionality 
   3. Bookable - check this box to make the room bookable by patrons
      1. Important! This box must be checked to make the room a bookable entity
   4. Joined Room - check this box if the room is attached to another room which could potentially be booked at the same time, the room will then be listed in a drop-down list with all other joined rooms for patrons to select from
      1. Important! Other room(s) must also have the Joined Room box checked as well to see the room(s) that could be selected as a joined space
   5. Location - select the location of the room
      1. Important! The values to select from here come from the Locations and Hours
   6. Occupancy - enter the maximum occupancy for the room
   7. Room Category - select the most appropriate value
      1. This is a filter vocabulary field as described in the Considerations section of this article  
   8. Room Type - select the most appropriate value
      1. This is a filter vocabulary field as described in the Considerations section of this article  
   9. Easy Form - select the appropriate form from the list, users/patrons completing a room booking will be prompted to also complete this form when submitting their request
      1. Important! the "Bookable" box must be checked in order for this field to appear
   10. Easy Form Settings, click the drop-down to expand the section
       1. Status, select the most appropriate option
          1. Open, the form is open and submissions can be made
          2. Closed, the form is closed and submissions cannot be made
          3. Scheduled, the form is open for submissions during a specified time
   11. Open Hours, click the drop-down to expand the section
       1. Click Set Open Hours, then enter the room's open hours for each day in the From and To fields
          1. Tip! If left blank, open hours will default to the hours of operation for the location selected in the location field (described above)
       2. Comment - use this field to add any relevant information, this could include typing 'Closed' if there were a day the room would not be bookable (on a consistent basis, for exceptions, see below)
       3. Click Add Time Slot if you wish to add multiple times during the day. When checked, a second set of From and To fields will appear below, repeat as needed
          1. For example, use this if the room is available from 8am - 11am, then again from 1pm - 3pm
       4. Click Copy last day or Copy previous day to save time in configuring open hours if they are the same for multiple days
   12. Update the Publishing Workflow if needed
   13. Click Save to save the room configuration