An online tool to help us schedule which family house is free to drive to

July 24, 2006 5:41 AM

ScheduleFilter : my familly has 3 houses we can all use during week-ends and holidays. We'd like an online tool to make some sort of "reservation" for a given house.

The way it is : my parents have their house in the suburbs, and my two brothers and I live each in our own appartments in the city or the suburbs. Parents also have a nice house by the sea, and another one by, well, another sea.

Rest assured, we do talk, see each other regularly and such, but we're looking for a tool (possible self-hosted+free+php) to quickly check who's where and when, for those moments where "oh, let's do a bbq in House #1 ! Well, the parents are indeed elsewhere, in House #2, but Brother #1 has already something schedulled in House #1 for the whole saturday. Maybe we can simply drive to House #3 for the week-end, it's free!" You get the idea.

Thank you for suggestions.

posted by XiBe to sports, hobbies, & recreation (5 comments total)

Both Yahoo! and Google let you share calendars with other folks.
posted by popechunk at 5:50 AM on July 24, 2006

here's a way you could use the shared calendar function for Google: make a public calendar for each house, make sure everyone is able to view and edit the events for each house's calendar.
This way, everyone will be able to view a constantly-updated calendar, and each 'reservation' would be an event that the person puts on that house's calendar.
posted by Sprout the Vulgarian at 6:16 AM on July 24, 2006

A friend and his family have a website for this exact purpose. They used Microsoft FrontPage (I know!) which has a built-in tool for forms. Each reservation is simply listed in a table for each cabin. If there's only 3 cabins and a few family groups, a form-updated list may be simpler and easier to read than a calendar with every single weekend on it. Email is in the profile if you want an example.
posted by muddgirl at 6:35 AM on July 24, 2006

Yahoo groups has a calendar in it. You can set it so that a reservation sends an email to the group and all reservations (events as they will be called) are listed in one place.
posted by jmgorman at 6:50 AM on July 24, 2006

Google Calendar integrates nicely with their personalized homepages and g-mail accounts (I've got a ton of invitations if you want one).

They even let you publish the calendar on other websites and blogs, so your whole familly doesn't have to sign up for google stuff. So it meets your self-hosted and free criteria, can't say about the php though.

All in all, pretty nifty.
posted by oddman at 7:14 AM on July 24, 2006