I’m really pleased by our latest release. Although doesn’t deliver any significant new functions, it does deliver quite a number of small enhancements requested by users, as well as fixing a few defects, and I think MyHallWizard is much the better for it.
Selecting Rooms and Extras
When entering a booking, we have replaced the multi-select fields used to enter the rooms and extras with checkboxes. This looks better and is much easier and more intuitive to use.
If all the rooms are free at the time of the booking, you will also see a new All Rooms option allowing you to book the entire venue with a single click.
You will notice that we are now using the room colours a lot more across MyHallWizard when referencing rooms, making the system a lot clearer at a glance. In particular, we recently added coloured circles to bookings in the Week, Month and List views in the calendar so you can easily see all the rooms which have been booked.
Buffer Periods
Many venues have asked if we can implement buffer periods between bookings. These are periods of time when you can’t make another booking, allowing for orderly changeover between customers and maybe for cleaning or resetting the room.
You can now choose to enter a buffer period by going to Settings -> Calendar Settings.
For example, if you select a 30 minute buffer period, you cannot put a new customer into a room within 30 minutes of the start or end of another booking.
Existing bookings are not affected, except if you try to edit their time or rooms.
Booking Enquiries
Following a request from one of our users and a survey with some of our other users, we have renamed Booking Requests to Booking Enquiries. You may want to check your email templates or your venue’s website to see if they need changing to correspond with this new name.
There are two minor changes to the functionality of Booking Enquiries.
Firstly, we’ve added the option to make the Customer Address field mandatory. This field was mandatory when we first built Booking Requests, and had been made optional at the request of one of our venues. However, other venues do require this information, so now you can choose.
Secondly, we’ve been asked to limit how far in advance customers can make booking enquiries. We’ve set the default for this to 12 months, but you can go into Settings and change it if you want a longer or shorter limit.
In both cases, these options are managed within Settings -> Calendar Settings. Don’t forget to click Save Changes once you have entered your new choices.
Minor Changes and Fixes
There are a few other changes and fixes we have released:
- Drag and drop in the Calendar is now working correctly again
- Clicking on a booking in the List view of the Calendar no longer results in an error
- Provisional Bookings within the Calendar now use white text against a dark grey background to meet accessibility requirements
- Text does not overflow from booking blocks in the Calendar
- The notifications at the top of the calendar for booking enquiries and provisional bookings have been merged into a single line, with buttons to take you through to the relevant screens.
- Printing the calendar has been improved, though we would still recommend using the Booking Report and printing this from your browser.
- Editing a repeat booking now sees clashes with other bookings
- Image tools, which allowed you to edit images within the Details field of a booking, are no longer available. It is still possibe to resize images or to decide whether to left, centre or right justify them, but if you want to crop them or change their brightness, contrast or colour, you should use an image editor before uploading to MyHallWizard.