Booking system with Events and Shop add-on advice

Hello Andrew,

If you can't use the Shop app alone, I would use Runway Collections for events. The Events add-on is old and doesn't offer the same flexibility Collections do.

Drew's comment on the app:

With Perch 3, I think the only reason you'd need the Events app is if you wanted that dedicated 2D calendar month grid view. That's otherwise quite tricky to do with a template.

For all other purposes, Events lags behind and I wouldn't recommend it.

I see the Shop add-on fires an event when a product is sold, could I listen for this event in the Events add-on and modify the related booking session accordingly (mark it as booked and therefore unavailable for booking / purchase)?

You can use the Perch API to update Collection items, which means you can listen for the event the Shop app fires when a product is sold and programmatically update a Collection item.

I was thinking the user wouldn't actually pay at the time of booking, so I guess the products would be free

You would normally use the manual gateway in this case instead of setting the price as zero.

Thanks Hussein,

Your answer should help to point me in the right direction :) Have you ever done a booking system using Perch before? If so how did it turn out? Would you recommend Perch for this purpose or some other CMS (I try very hard to avoid Wordpress these days).

Thanks!

Would you recommend Perch for this purpose or some other CMS (I try very hard to avoid Wordpress these days).

It depends.

If you need to sell tickets/spots for an event (fixed number of tickets/spots for a fixed date and time), then sure you can use Perch to sell event tickets. You can do this with Perch Shop.

If you need something more advanced than that (e.g. appointment scheduling), then I don't think there's something built-in in Perch that would allow you to easily implement this. You would probably need to write an add-on for this.

Another solution would be to integrate a third-party booking system into your Perch site. Probably the main downside of this is that you/your client would most likely need to pay a monthly fee for the third-party system.