• pat
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  • Registered: 2019-03-31
  • Posts: 9

Topic: Emailing event to customers

We are a lawn bowling club in Perth, West Australia. We use luxcal extensively to manage our facilities bookings which is our financial lifeblood.  Primarily, we have two types of events.  One is in-house events and regular users events and the other is one off customers who book our facilities for functions.  Thus we operate with 'customers' who make 'bookings' with us for their events.

It would be nice to email  these 'customers' the confirmation of their 'booking'. This would be similar to  "Send email" function on the events pop-up panel.   We have played around with this is and it could probably be ok for us to use.  However the email message has an 'Open calendar' link at the bottom of the message.  We would like to not have this link as we don't allow 'customers' to view our calendar for multiple reasons.

I have looked at the files to see where it's generated and think it's in messaging.php around line 190 (V521).  If I disable this line I assume the 'Open calendar' link would not appear.

Now for the suggestion.  How about having an ability to send an email message to the 'customer' who would receive most of the event data but without the ability to access the calendar.

Quote Post 1

2 Reply by Schwartz (edited by Schwartz 2023-03-23 13:18:06)

  • From: DK
  • Registered: 2018-03-02
  • Posts: 165

Re: Emailing event to customers

Hello Pat

Normally the access to the calendar is managed by setting the users (public, user and user group) credentials.
Who creates the booking event? Is it a user or is all allowed to do so?

If you could explain how the bookings are managed, maybe there would be a better solution than removing a link.

Schwartz's Website

Quote Post 2

  • pat
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Re: Emailing event to customers

Hi Shwartz.
Let me explain.  The 'customer' is not a user.  We use the system as follows.
1.  An external customer initially requests facilities hiring information via a web based contact form on our website.  This gets emailed to the Booking Officer.
2. Our Booking Officer responds with the necessary hiring information and sends a Booking Form to the external customer who then fills it out and sends back.
3. Our Calendar now comes into play.  The Booking Officer - who is the user with admin rights - fills in the necessary event booking information in the calendar.
4.  The Booking Officer then sends an invoice - MYOB generated - to the external customer for the booked event via email.  When the external customer pays the invoice, we change the category of the event.

In the meantime, there are other people i.e. volunteers, in the club who will view the calendar regularly.  They may have varying degrees of access e.g. Admin or Manager or Read Access.  This allows these volunteers, who may be assisting with the event just booked, to know whats going on.   In fact we also use Display 1 to show upcoming events, again for the benefit of our volunteers and helpers.

The external customer in the meantime is not aware of our calendar and as far as they are concerned the booking was made and they then turn up for their booked event at the Club.

It would be nice to generate an email message and perhaps an SMS message, to be sent to the external customer to confirm their booking.  Like the 'Send email' on the event panel.  The external customer does not need to know we run luxcal or how we manage our bookings.  They just want to know that we have booked them in.

I have tested the 'Send email' to external people and they can view the calendar via the link at the bottom, albeit at Read Access level only, even though they are not users.

Quote Post 3

  • From: DK
  • Registered: 2018-03-02
  • Posts: 165

Re: Emailing event to customers

It is possible to set the calendar up, so there is no public access.
You then have to be logged in to see the calendar.
This way it is still possible for a logged in user to send an email or SMS (or both) from the event.
The data attached to the event will still be sent (title, date and time and eventual attachments or other things registered for the event) but if the user clicks the link to the calendar it will not be possible for him/her to see anything. So the data in the mail is to be seen but the event in the calendar is not to be seen.

Is this what you want?

Schwartz's Website

Quote Post 4

  • pat
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Re: Emailing event to customers

We only have 4 people who can log in and they manage the Calendar.  Then we have other volunteers who come and go and help with various aspects of events by customers. Almost all our people are older who have limited to no computer experience apart from emails, sms and facebook.  So setting up for all these other people as users with varying degrees of access is very difficult.  As it happens I'm the only one with IT knowledge.
To be honest. we don't use the events email function anyway.  It was just a thought to see if it could assist the Booking Officer.  If all it takes is to modify one line of code to make it acceptable, then that would probably do us.

Quote Post 5

  • From: DK
  • Registered: 2018-03-02
  • Posts: 165

Re: Emailing event to customers

OK - I see the problem then.
Some not logged in users should be able to see the calendar and the content and some not logged in users should not be able to see the calendar.
And that is why you can't use any of the settings that could restrict access.

Then we are back to some change of code or a setting for the mail. I think only Roel can give the answer to that.
Even if the logical solution would be to restrict public access when public access to the calendar should not be possible, I see the problem with all the persons that would then need to make logins. And I see the problem for the people that have none or little knowledge to IT.

Schwartz's Website

Quote Post 6

  • pat
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Re: Emailing event to customers

Yes, that's about it Schwartz.  Luxcal is still the best system I've come across and that's why we use it.  There are calendars and there are booking systems but luxcal, for us at least, is adaptable to be both.  Because we have   a mixture of regular in-house events and one off booked events.
This year we will be upgrading our website to use Wordpress as the CMS to make it easier for others to maintain as I'm pulling back a bit.  Now I don't like Wordpress but it seems to be ideal for those in the club who would just update content and not make code changes .  But we will still retain luxcal.  I had used a small, very simple and free CMS called Responsee which allowed me to modify and create code, mostly php, to suit our needs and to create a system to manage our teams.  But our website is a bit tired now so hence the upgrade.

Quote Post 7