jAC Addon Info

About this Site

The data here is not for real properties! You are invited to add your own sample data to this demo in order to see how it may work for you.

jAC Calendar Integration has some basic features and some advanced features. The basic use is to provide a calendar within your site so that owners can enter, save, and display their property availability on their listing page. The advanced features allow integrateing an owners existing calendar at another site into the availability display; group calendars, and availability searching. jAC has been tested on OR versions 2.2 through 2.5.

A minimal usage sample

A demo of minimum usage of the addon is available to test drive the minimum ussage. Visit the jAC Minimum Usage Site.

The jAC ADDON

The site you are looking at now is a demo of using all the features of jAC.

The jAC addon provides agent admin screens where an agent can associate a property with an existing calendar on one of the popular rental calendar sites. The addon creates one table in the OR database that includes the listingID, ownerID, and the calendar source code, and calendar source calendarid. Based on that table, you use tags in your OR templates to retrieve those calendars. Owners of properties already have these calendars, they don't usually want to enter booking info again on your site.

However, if you do want to provide your own calendar with non-available days entry, that option is also provided. An additional table is used to store this availability dates for all properties.

The addon supports the following popular calendars:

The addon will retrieve the data from those calendars and CACHES IT LOCALLY ON YOUR SITE. Using that cached data, it can display calendars, and SEARCH AVAILABILITY regradless of the data source.

I can usually modify the retrieval process to get data from any other calendar. Let me know if you need a custom retrieval.

Background

jAC includes the following features

• Utilize owners existing calendar data from rentors.org, homeaway.com, and other calendar sources.
• Each property can have different calendar source
• A property can still utilize the jAC booking entry on your site
• Show a Group Calendar for an agent with multiple properties
• Search Availability
• The jAC Calendar engine is themeable.

The primary idea for jAC is that your calendars come from source, so there is no date entry involved in your OR site. However, the option is there to have a calendar entry directly on your site. If an agent associates his calendar with an external calendar such as rentors.org, then the agent is not presented with the booking entry screens. The bookings are maintained by the agent on their external calendar site.

For the listing detail page have 3 display option tags to choose from. (You can create your own tags too, based on the defaults in jAC). One tag is preconfigured to use the jac themeable php calendar. The other tag is just an empty shell that you could incorporate some other calendar by adding php in the tag's view file. The other tag shows you how to use the availability data with the Yahoo UI calendar.

Try an Existing Owner

You can log in as a sample owner that is already in the system.
username: billy
password: billy
Use the menu on the left and click on Owners Login and then use the data above to log in. There are already 2 properties associated with this owner. Please don't delete or make crazy changes. Just use it to explore Open Realty and jAC.
If you want to add your own test data, please register yourself below to try it out!

Register yourself as a test user

Use the menu on the left and click on Owners Signup. You will be given immediate access to add properties and test it out.

DOWNLOAD and Install THE ADDON

It is fairly straightforward. Download and Install the Addon

ADDON: XML DATA FEED

Another addon is available if you email me. This addon has nothing to do with calendars. This independent addon jacxml provides a URL for each property in an XML format. That is similar to RSS but has whatever property data fields you want in it. This is useful to provide access to your OR data from another application.

Please give Feedback!

I would really appreciate if you help improve the product. Or if you are interested for your own site.
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