ResMania The Advanced Modular Reservation Framework System/Solution for Joomla and Drupal Editor's Review

Editor's rating

The editor's rating is calculated based on the average of the following criteria, rated on a
scale of 1 of 5:

• Installation: 5
• Features: 4
• Interface: 4
• Customization: 5
• Help and support: 4

Bottom line

"ResMania boasts a nice set of features to provide a flexible reservation system suitable for a wide range of rental businesses, while managing to stay simple, fast, and competent." - Ahmad Permessur, Editor - HotScripts.com

Pros and cons

Pros

• Offers localization features, including multilingual support, currency, tax rate, and date format.
• Has a well-documented support wiki coupled with great video walkthroughs.
• Includes an extendable module and plugin system, making it even more versatile.
• Provides excellent built-in customizing tools.
• Ties in nicely with other Joomla or Drupal plugins.
• Allows even further code customization via APIs.

Cons

• Extra functionalities, like reporting or the reservation planner, require the purchase of additional modules.
• Limited support of payment gateways.
• It could be even smarter and more autonomous in certain areas.

Detailed review

ResMania is a booking and reservation management system available as either a Drupal or Joomla module. For this review, I test-drove the Joomla module, but the Drupal one would function in much the same manner. Both hook and integrate perfectly with the CMS, leveraging its core functionalities to provide a state-of-the-art platform that is robust, reliable, and fast.

The idea of using modules might turn some people off, but in today’s development world, leveraging core functionalities of popular open-source CMSs like Joomla and Drupal provides added benefits and can cut down development and maintenance costs in the long run. For instance, your online presence is likely to consist of more than a reservation platform — you would want to have information pages, a contact form, or even sophisticated features like forums, helpdesk, and a blog. Since both Joomla and Drupal have existing modules for these extra functionalities, you benefit from a single interconnected console that makes it easy to manage all your business operations.

Installing ResMania was a snap. Just install Joomla (or Drupal) and then load ResMania as a module to activate it. Its interface may look confusing at first, but turned out to be not as intimidating as I first thought, and is quite logical after all. The tree navigation and the tabs navigation provide an all-around simplified interface. That, together with a built-in help area, make it a rich and unobtrusive application to work with.

ResMania is based on the concept of units, where a unit can be a property, a vehicle, or any other item available for rent over a period of time (days or hours). The application is bundled with a default and property unit type. One of its best features is that the online reservation portal can include items from different unit types and be mixed and matched with different pricing schemes. When adding a new unit, you are presented with a set of configuration options that include description and date the property is available for rent, along with any minimum or maximum length of stay. I simply love the ability to specify different pricing depending on a custom period, which is eventually displayed on the listings public view.

Whenever a new order is placed, it lands in the Reservations section, which has been built to look and work like an email inbox. From there, you can confirm the reservation, add any internal notes, or make adjustments to the dates booked. A reservation planner is also at your disposal. Sporting a calendar look-and-feel, it provides a birds-eye view of all your reservations for all your units through nicely color-coded entries.

The front-end interface is streamlined and delivers a very nice user experience. Listings include an availability booking calendar that automatically highlights blocked or reserved dates. Depending on your pricing configuration, the dynamic pricing calculator will output the total price after the user enters a date range choice using date-picker controls. Upon checkout, the user is required to fill out a registration form or log in to his existing account and proceed to the payment page. Overall, the front-end works fine for its purpose, but could be a bit snappier in places.

Customizing ResMania couldn't be easier. Since it works as a module to Joomla and Drupal, the overall look and feel are controlled through the CMS themes. For advanced changes to the front-end pages layout, a sleek form designer feature provides a drag-and-drop mechanism to add, remove, and rearrange elements — all with very little effort. Some of the default messages and email templates can be edited as well.

ResMania comes with two modules (front-end blocks) for search and a shopping cart. There are also several generic pages, such as category, reservation, and advanced search that can be easily added and arranged throughout the site.

But these are not the only reasons I like this application so much. As I got more familiar with the application, one aspect of ResMania stood out clearly. The developers have ingeniously built-in several features to allow ResMania to work great offline as well. In any industry that involves bookings and reservations, requests might come from different channels — walk-ins, phone calls, or emails — and ResMania caters to these like a charm. Examples include the ability to manually create reservations, assign pricing to these, and send email or print invoices with payment instructions. By perfectly combining online and offline orders, ResMania eliminates any cumbersome manual reservations procedures.

All in all, ResMania is a highly flexible and robust application that makes it easy to set up and manage a professional reservation system. The only caveat is that ResMania will work fine as an out-of-the-box solution for many businesses, but if you require special operation rules such as different hospitality prices, hourly pricing schemes, or complex reporting needs, you will need to purchase additional extensions. Pricing for these extensions is fairly reasonable.

Screenshots