Greg and I spent a little time looking at options for an online booking system that Judy can use to handle booking of the lab workstations. We settled for the moment on MRBS, and open-source PHP/mySQL system which seems simple and easily configurable. We set it up and started testing it. It's intended to be used for room bookings, with rooms divided into areas, but since all the text on the pages comes from a language file we were able to customize it to handle computers in rooms instead of rooms in areas, very simply, just by editing the language file. The resulting booking calendar seems to be nicely printable, and the CSS is centrally configured via a PHP system which abstracts the settings into variables which are used to construct the stylesheet. We'll probably want to write our own stylesheet when we get comfortable with it, because it's not terribly pretty, but it's certainly usable out of the box.

Pros:

• Lovely clean code.
• Really well commented.
• Documentation is sufficient and clear.
• DB structure is very straightforward.
• UTF8 support.
• Good separation of concerns (page generation, CSS, GUI strings, etc.).

Cons

• HTML 4.01 (could be rewritten in XHTML, but would be tiresome and provide little benefit).
• Not so pretty (yet).