Latest updates from Tribalogic HQ

Written by Robin Morris on 21 March 2014

This week saw the launch of the Haymarket Media group website practicalcaravan.com.

The new practicalcaravan.com was built in close partnership with the Practical Caravan team at Haymarket Media Group.

Written by Robin Morris on 29 June 2015

Written by Robin Morris on 17 February 2014

Taking card payments for bookings in the Tribalogic Admin Console.

We are always looking for areas where we can help out our clients with their business processes. 

After chatting through the next area where we could help out, we decided to implement the ability to take payments and issue refunds directly from within the console.

You can now: 

• take a balance payment over the phone by card
• refund a payment made by the customer*

 

^* supported payment gateways only

Written by Robin Morris on 07 February 2014

We needed to organise our development sprints, we could not find the perfect solution... so we built our own.

At Tribalogic we use the Agile methodology for our development - planning detailed work no more than one week in advance.  This means:

• weekly development sprints; and
• releasing updates to our Platform roughly every three weeks.

Trac has been our main organisational tool but we needed something to help us work as a team and communicate with our clients.

Basic requirements

• a list of tasks we could all create, edit and view as a team
• a way of organising our weekly sprints
• show clients what we are up to in relation to their tasks

We looked at various 3rd party products such as Jira, agile zen, Planbox, Mavenlink & Pivotal Tracker.  They all have great features and could work well especially using them from the start of a project.

But none of them were quite working for us... 

Building our own

We realised that the Tribalogic Platform could be moulded into a great agile development tool so we set about making some changes that would let this happen.

A "dev tickets" menu

In the Admin Console, we added "dev tickets" into the user menu.  

Our clients can now view the tasks that we are doing from them right within the Platform Admin Console that they log into every day.

The clever bit is that we have done it in such a way that we can now easily place all sorts of things in the user menu if we choose... which may come in handy later.

An overview of the current sprint / week

To visualise our weekly sprints, we created a Sprint Board.  

The Sprint Board is used to:

• show the current sprint/week's activity
• allow prioritisation of the Backlog 

The advantages of using our own software

As a software company, we are in the advantageous position of having the resources to build our own project management tools.  We can refine and alter them as we see fit.

As the expression goes we are "eating our own dog food" on a daily basis so that will force us to refine our interfaces which will have direct benefits to our clients.

Written by Robin Morris on 04 February 2014

Track your booking source.

Every booking that goes through the Tribalogic Platform is assigned to a "Syndicates".  This is used to identify where the booking came from - email, own website, phone etc.

But what about bookings that came via a 3rd party website or a link in an advert?

Your Tribalogic website can track the visitor and assign any booking to a Syndicate of your choice.

Written by Robin Morris on 29 June 2015

Major updates

• Admin Console: allow deposits to be recorded after a booking is made
• Admin Console: allow payments to be refunded
• Admin Console: improvements when viewing a single booking
• Admin Console: allow Stripe gateways to take phone payments
• Platform: created an Element type for storing key-value pairs
• Platform: give Client's the ability to prioritise their own Development Tickets
• Platform: add a new Sprint Board that allows Client's to view the exact stage of Development Tickets

Minor updates and bug fixes

• Accommodation: updated feed to support new Parks Resorts accommodation feed
• Admin Console: add feedback for when Subscription payments fail
• Admin Console: add a switch interface for when there are exactly two Services to choose between
• Admin Console: improve help when setting up weekly rates in Bookster
• Admin Console: when viewing an Entry, restrict the 'Create new...' option to the same Type
• Platform: implement the concept of protected Syndicates
• Platform: include service ratings in FeeFo reviews
• Platform: load some booking calendars using AJAX to avoid caching
• Platform: convert distance from search to be cache friendly

Written by Robin Morris on 31 January 2014

Sometimes a user needs to be given a nudge in the right direction.

The Tribalogic Platform is a flexible and powerful directory tool, allowing us to do some great things for our clients.  A good example is how we can give preferred listings additional prominance throughout a website.

Example - Caravan Sitefinder "Book online" parks

When searching for caravan parks and campsites, Caravan Sitefinder shows the user a bookable park that matches their search criteria above other listings.

Written by Robin Morris on 22 January 2014

Filter and export user reviews from the Admin Console.

Filtering user reviews

In the Admin Console, quickly search through reviews left by users on:

• date (created, experience, reply)
• Editors pick (yes / no)
• Entry id
• Entry name
• Reply (yes / no)
• State (moderated etc.)

Export

It is now also possible to export your User Reviews in Excel format.

 

Written by Robin Morris on 22 January 2014

Improvements to our Platform mean that updates to content will, in most cases, now be published instantly.

To aid performance, we used to have a cache that expired after roughly two hours for all content - meaning that updates applied in the Admin Console may take that long to appear on your website.

Written by Robin Morris on 29 June 2015