Last Addition
After the feature debacle with Dreamhost, M5Hosting.com is the new home of FoodTruckYP.com and it looks like they are even more nerdy than I needed. That’s a good thing.
While demonstrating the public profile pages to MattyD of House of Siam on Wheels, I heard something from him that I’ve heard more than once… “Do we have to enter our schedules ourselves?”
First response, “Well, people do need to find you,” but the I thought about it for a moment, and it’s actually not always true that mobile food vendors should enter their own schedules in this tool that is FoodTruckYP. So, the booking feature is going to be implemented in the back end in order to make unified schedule entry ready sooner rather than later.
Up until now, vendor schedules and events were two different pieces of data and there was some weird glue between them to merge an external schedule (an event booking) with the schedule for a vendor. But it all becomes clear when any schedule and any event are made the same thing. This slight redesign also makes it far easier to implement seasonal schedules for events (for example, a summer event that happens weekly and then switches to monthly or bi-weekly in the cooler months), but it also makes it easy for one organizer to schedule any number of vendors for a particular window of time (a timeslot), whether the organizer is a mobile vendor scheduling themselves, or a business scheduling weekly lunches for their employees with different vendors at different times.
So my second response to MattyD would be, “not always.”
This approach also makes the Event Page easier to create, which will make better promotional tools for vendors appearing at events where long tweets or facebook posts aren’t always practical or detailed enough. For example, each event page would contain profile links for all of the participating vendors automatically, whether the event is “Huge Truck Rally” or “Weekly Lunch at Acme.”
This change in the back end will likely be mostly transparent in the front end initially (famous last words), until event booking is integrated in. This enables schedule entry by vendors initially, until we catch on, so to speak.
