The Court Booking System

Why two different styles?

The WCF Court Booking System evolved from a booking system that has been running for croquet clubs in East Anglia, a region in eastern England, for over 10 years. It was adapted for croquet from a more general Meeting Room Booking System. Computer technology is evolving rapidly and as a 10-year-old system the East Anglian user interface is now quite dated. So it was time to modernise aspects of it for the current WCF release. However, in order to help the existing users with the transition, both old and new styles are now available on the same system for users to choose between. The underlying bookings are still the same.

The main differences in the new style are:

• The new layout has dispensed with a lot of the text items that you click on to change between different dates, and replaced them with buttons and a pop-up calendar-style navigation, which means a less cluttered page. The new design is also intended to work rather better on mobile devices.
• Bookings can now be seen and made in many different languages.
• If you access the bookings website without specifying any particular club, you will land as usual on the 'Demonstration club'. But in addition you will see a club selection mechanism at the top of the page which first requires you to select a country, and then from a list of clubs in that country. You might see it there now. In most cases it should default to the country in which you are actually located. Apart from England these country lists will be empty at first, except that the Demonstration system is available to all.
  
  If you arrive in the bookings system directly on the page for your own club, as most people do, then the club selection will disappear from the menu at the top, but it can still be accessed via the Settings and Preferences icon in the top right corner.
• In some countries there is more than one language in common use; or users of the system could be travelling abroad; or you might have a member of your own club who would prefer to use a different language. So the choice of language in the system is separate from the choice of country, though for most users the choice will probably be the obvious one for their home country.

Languages and international features

In principle, all the main languages used by all Full, Associate and other Recognised WCF member countries are available, though initially there are some translations missing for some phrases. Where a particular translation is missing the English version will appear instead. Corrections and help with translations would be appreciated!

The system should normally be able to identify the country you are browsing from, your preferred language and your local time-zone from the information that your browser sends automatically when you visit the website. This information is used to determine a default language and initial country for selection of a club. Any user can choose to override this automatic selection and pick a different country and/or language if they wish. The selection of language and country in turn determines a few other things such as how calendars are presented and dates are formatted, which days are considered to be weekend days, etc.

Please note that when using the old style interface you will only be able to override the default selection of country or language by using this page and accessing the Settings via the icon in the top right corner.

When using the new style interface you can access your Settings and Preferences using the Settings icon in the top right corner of every page.

Return to your bookings