Hi all. I have a requirement at the moment to create a website that will allow me to sell hotel rooms and holiday packages for families. I am a php developer and I realise that doing it all myself is taking a lot of time and effort. Plus I’m not very good with database design and normalisation.
What would be the best option for something like this? Do I use magento or are there more suitable options?
He’s got options to books rooms and packages with flexibility to choose no. of persons for the package, no. of rooms where simply booking rooms is what the customer prefers etc.
Magneto will work. Have you looked at incorporating a CMS and leveraging an ecommerce plugin to handle the functional requirements?
You said PHP so my mind jumps to Wordpress or Drupal. Both of plugins/modules to handle creating products and a checkout process. Rooms are “products” here. Are you familiar with one or the other CMS?
The community edition of Magento will provide everything your client needs to run fairly robust/feature rich ecommerce website out of the box. Wordpress on the other hand will *probably require extensions galore to make it an acceptable option. Magento is all OOP code where as WP is a huge procedural mess. Not to say Magento is the mecca of code quality or anything (it isn’t) but from the perspective of setting up an ecommerce site *quickly which is fairly flexible it is an adequate solution. There is also Drupal with Commerce of Commerce Kickstart. I’m not familiar with Commerce Kickstart but it is suppose to be similar to Magento in that it a store ready to go out of the box.