As anyone who's created a project that utilizes Drupal's CVS knows, the process takes some effort... but once the project is created, the benefits of the issues queue, tacking updates, reviewing patches, etc outweigh the effort of getting the project started.
MERCI can now be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/merci
You'll need to view the releases as we are not going to be supporting MERCI beyond the 6 Open Media Project partners and alternates until after July. We'd like to, but we hardly have to time to get everything else we've committed to Knight, our partners, and to do for Denver Open Media done. We just can't support this until after July, but we do want to engage the locations we are working with in a very "Drupal way". So that's logic around committing the MERCI to CVS, but not releasing a supported version.
Comments
Looks promising
I'm trying out your first public release. It looks promising.
I know you are all busy but I'd like to know if you plan to publish a roadmap which would tell us what is coming next, and if possible, offer a timeframe.
I'll follow this project closely.
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MERCI's short term roadmap
Our short term roadmap for MERCI is to develop some default Views to include with the Module, add calendar preview to the UI so users can see when a bucket or resource is already booked, and add the role based rules feature.
Views - In Denver we have a View for My Reservations for each user. A View for all Upcoming Reservations used by staff and interns. We have not created any Views for usage reports or anything like that.
Calendar Preview - In the current release, when a user is told their reservation conflicts with another reservation, they are blindly trying to schedule around it. The challenge with a calendar display is dealing with Buckets. We limited reservations to 15 minute increments to help with this, but there are still 672 slots that need to be checked for each item in the Bucket. A Bucket with 10 items will have an array with 6,720 items to render the availability of week.
Role based Rules - Currently MERCI only supports a default set of rules for each content type. In future releases we want to add a different set of rules for each role. The role based rules feature would allow users in a role like "Photography 100" to reserve a digital SLR for only 3 hours, but users in the "Photography 400" would be able to check out the same content type for 24 hours.
Calculation of Charges - MERCI is configured with a prices per hour after a set number of free hours and for a late fee. This information is stored for reporting, but it isn't displayed anywhere during the checkout process. We need to add a step where this is displayed when a Reservation's status is moved form Pending to Checked Out.
Printed Contract - At Denver Open Media, we are still using the same printed contract we had before MERCI for each checkout. Staff or interns check off the equipment the user takes on a paper contract the user signs. I'd really like to see the paper contracts replaced completely, but until then we'll try to reduce the redundancy by generating a printable contract for saff/interns to print.
Beyond that, we are really looking to our partner locations with larger checkouts to provide more feedback and drive MERCI's development.
It's worth noting that we are using MERCI at Denver Open Media. We manage permissions through CiviCRM Role and Group synchronization. One of the biggest issues we've run into wasn't a error in MERCI, but the fact that MERCI actually enforces rules our previous system didn't. We've found dozens of users with expired memberships, missing certifications, or who hadn't contributed video back to the station that had been reserving equipment with the old system. There were more people with issues involving their membership the first 30 days using MERCI at DOM than there where actual issues with the code.
24-hour slots
How about creating an alternate reservation system using 24-hour slots (or day) so that we would have only 28 to 31 slots per months. Can MERCI be configured to use 15-minutes slots, 1-hour slots, 1-day slots when dealing with reservation and conflicts?
I'm asking this because most of the companies we deal with are renting equipement by day (more or less 24 hours). For example they rent Monday at 11 am and must bring back the equipment before 9 am the next day. And the studio I'm setting up MERCI with is also using 24-hour (or day) slots.
Thank you for posting a quick road map.
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Merci for merci
Very cool . . . I'm going to check it out tomorrow. Tonight there is an Austin Drupal Users Group that I'm going to. And I'll be promoting the Open Media Project.
upgrading to 6
This release has got me excited to upgrade to Drupal 6. I know there are a number of folks outside this project that are interested in the MERCI alternative. I hope that I can work with some experts in the area to build upon this foundation (maybe even at the ACM NE Spring conference?)
MERCI was to designed to be
MERCI was to designed to be able to be integrated with the Open Media modules, CiviCRM, and Organic Groups, but doesn't require any of those. We didn't really want to develop/own MERCI, but there just wasn't anything else out there that had the functionality we needed. I demonstrated MERCI to a group of media librarians while they were in Denver for ALA conference last week. We installed it in Urbana (http://www.urbanapublictelevision.org) as part of their implementation this week. While I was in Urbana, also did a demo for a few people from Bradley University who are still using an old open source checkout I wrote called phpLabMan (http://phplabman.sourceforge.net/).
phpLabMan didn't include reservations or buckets. The Bradley people seemed excited about moving to MERCI since it does everything phpLabMan did and the College of Communications and Fine Arts already uses Drupal for their college site (http://slane.bradley.edu/) as well as most of their departments (Art, Multimedia, Music, and Theatre)
Update
Hi All,
Is development on MERCI proceeding or is this a dead module? The posting on drupal.org says nothing until after July and I understand how long things take but if this is not going forward I want to work on something specific to my site rather than wait.
Thanks,
Duck!
MERCI is alive and well.
MERCI is alive and well. We've just wrapped up installing it at 6 stations and we're now working through the issues each station brought up. Denver and Urbana have posted their requests and we'll be committing updates as we work through those...
http://groups.drupal.org/node/24817#comment-85736
There's still a number of features that need polish, but the core validation is already there. We use MERCI everyday at Denver Open Media. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do, but I'm guessing you could be doing it now with MERCI.