This package contains all you need to launch a booking service associated with a Telegram bot. The scripts interact with the Telegram Bot API to create a communication flow inside the bot chat in your Telegram client application (both on mobiles and desktop environments). Most of the features below are configurable via a convenient JSON configuration file. Relevant data is saved in a single-file SQLite database, generated when the bot is launched for the first time. 

Please have a look at our documentation for further details:

Zweb Wiki Docs

Alternative link to the telegram demo:

Demo

Forum (for issues and information):

Forum

Below is a list with a brief description of what the Zweb Booking Bot application offers. With this bot you can:

• book a service of your choice among various hourly services;
• choose a day of the week for booking - normally up to 2 weeks away from 'today';
• view a list of available times divided by customized time intervals;
• choose the duration of your reservation;
• view the list of your active reservations;
• cancel your own reservation;
• view an information content, typically containing the description, conditions and prices related to the service;
• receive a pro-forma ticket containing the main information of your reservation;
• if activated by the bot settings, register with your Telegram phone and full name, and then you'll have the option to book;
• view ###strong/strong### (in Telegram location format) of the structure;

In addition to all previous features, the service manager can also:

• send reservation schedules to their Google Calendar;
• (asked from our customers) create virtual services, that is services that depend on another service declared as 'parent' and sharing the same timetable: this may come in very handy when you want to differentiate services that use a shared asset (a person, a room, etc.);
• create rules to establish one or more specific operating time slots for a single day of the week (i.e. operating shifts), including rules that become valid starting from some hours in the future (this can now be configured); each rule remains valid until it is set again: ###u/u### for that day of the week;
• view all active rules for operating hours;
• retrieve, in .xlsx format (Microsoft Excel), a reservation table based on quantity of reservations, or by specifying a month and year, or retrieve only the reservations that are still active (future reservations, both active or cancelled by the user);
• view in monospaced text format all the currently active reservations; now buttons can be added from the configuration in order to show only reservations of a specific service;
• make a fast reservation by means of a text message;
• cancel someone else's reservation or edit one of theirs;
• make a weekly recurring reservation;
• use reserved services (i.e. available to them only);
• access a full list of reservations in csv format (comma separated values, universal file format that can be opened by spreadsheet applications and simple text editors);
• access the list of registered users (only if registration is active: see below)
• cancel a specific registration or reservation (the latter can be done either via a text command or a button);
• disable a user or enable a disabled user, either via text commands or the control panel;
• promote a user to a different role, thus modifying the number of maximum reservations available for that user, either via text commands or the control panel.

• PHP >= 8.2 (mandatory)
• GD library (graphic library PHP module) installed (if you want to print ticket images, highly recommended)
• Sqlite3 module for PHP installed. In order to keep things simple and as portable as possible, the bot reservations, users etc. will be saved in a Sqlite single file database.
• Composer for your OS (get it here)
• It may be useful to have the timezone libraries you need, installed on your web server machine. See pages like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10909911/php-setlocale-has-no-effect for further details.
• A Google free email account if you want to send your schedules to Google Calendar

First time setup:

1. Unzip this package in a folder of your machine;
2. Download Telegram, and go to Telegram bot named Botfather to create a new bot;
3. Copy and save the token associated with your bot;
4. Run

   composer install
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   from the root folder of this software;
5. Copy/paste the .env.dist file in the root folder of the package, and rename it '.env' (without quotes)
6. Edit the .env file inserting the token you received from Botfather in the appropriate parameter (TOKEN="your_token_here")
7. From the command line, run

   php bot.php
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   to start the bot software in development mode.
8. Optional: Make a reservation with the bot, then open your sqlite db and retrieve your telegram identification number. Add this number inside the square bracket of the JSON config file of the property telegram_keeper_id. Stop the bot (usually CTRL + C or CMD + C depending on the OS), and then launch it again to see extra functions reserved to the service manager (Hint: you can add a list of telegram ids separated by comma, thus granting all the corresponding Telegram users access to bot management functions, accessible from the 'control_panel' button-command). That's it!