By swindonHotels on

Pretty much finished my Drupal site (here - Swindon Hotels)

It integrates with laterooms via an XML feed for booking hotels in my local town of Swindon.

All kinds of constructive criticism are welcome.

Is Drupal quite memory intensive by any chance? It seems that my VPS keeps falling over for some reason! Might have to cache the heck out of it...

Cheers,
Paul

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

thebeardedguy’s picture

thebeardedguy commented

Your site is taking lot of time to open? Please check with your hosting provider. And when it is resolves it shows a blank page.

swindonHotels’s picture

swindonHotels commented

Hosting issues should be resolved now!!

Cron.php and caching meant that the database was 2gb in size!!!

I've been up all night trying to fix it....

But, here it is! http://www.swindon-hotels.org

All constructive criticism welcome :)

Cheers,
Paul

weblance’s picture

weblance commented

I am doing a similar site and I am experience a severe case of, why didn't I think of that. Did you build your own hotel module?

swindonHotels’s picture

swindonHotels commented

Hey Jeff,

Cheers for the compliment. Actually I don't really know how to do build my own modules unfortunately. What I'll do at some point in the near future is take the site to another town in the UK and when I do that I'll build a module for it. I'm still kind of learning the ropes when it comes to Drupal.

inosaur’s picture

inosaur commented

Hi Paul, the site looks really good!!!

I am doing something similar at the moment and I hope it will be ready and online by march.
Most of the things you use on the site look quiet familiar, but I am still far away from what you
did already! I like the site and how it is built, but there are also some bugs..

e.g. I tried to book and got the following error:

Thank you for reserving through us! Please wait while you're redirected to your secure online booking page....
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user 'swindon_paul'@'localhost' (using password: YES) in /home/spitscom/public_html/swindon-hotels.org/makeBooking.php on line 43
Could not connect: Access denied for user 'swindon_paul'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

url: http://www.swindon-hotels.org/makeBooking.php

hope this helps...?

Ino

swindonHotels’s picture

swindonHotels commented

Ha, cheers Ino. Wondered why my affiliate commissions had taken a dive, that might explain it :D

I recently did a server move and obviously forgot to update one of my files. Thanks for letting me know :)

Are you interfacing with Laterooms too via XML?

swindonHotels’s picture

swindonHotels commented

OK, bookings should be fixed now.

There are a few other bugs that I need to clear up, but my main concern at the moment is SEO!

Can't get the site ranked high enough at the moment :(

mk3’s picture

mk3 commented

How did you managed to integrate XML feeds so gracefully what modules did you used?

swindonHotels’s picture

swindonHotels commented

Gotta be honest - I hacked the crap out of my templates to integrate with the Laterooms API.

If there's sufficient interest I'll put it into a module and add it to the Drupal module list. I'm packed to the rafters at the moment but should be able to get it done fairly soon.

coxw’s picture

coxw commented

How did you handle searching on so many fields?

swindonHotels’s picture

swindonHotels commented

I presume you're talking about the availability block in the top left corner? If so, the site just sends the variables to Laterooms.com through the Laterooms API and the results set is returned.

socialtalker’s picture

socialtalker commented

yes, i would like to see a module for laterooms api when you get a chance

mk3’s picture

mk3 commented

What modules and/or techniques you used to send and get data from third party website. Because I have searched everywhere for it and it seems that there is no info regarding all this.

secoif’s picture

secoif commented

it would be a lot easier for the eye to move around the page without the dark black borders on your boxes like "Search Hotels". Also could do with some information hierarchy work: eg Make the important stuff obvious, because everything is the same font size, I can't figure out what's important, what do you want me to look at? I suspect it's the yellow Search Hotels box? why not whack that in the middle of the page? make it the focus? Remember, less is more.

sunny listin’s picture

sunny listin commented

Hi Swindon hotels,

Im trying to integrate this site: www.solidrooms.com into laterooms.com, but have a very small technical know how concerning integrations. Could you please tell me what drupal module you used in integrating into laterooms.com?

Answers will be appreciated from any one who as well as a solution to this question

Thank you all in advance for your time.