Equipment Rental System Reservation System Rent Master Rent System

Added send & return email notices for rental queue products
Import/export support using regular import/export which can run faster than import/export profiles
jQuery conflict fixes for custom templates
Solved bug on sales > orders for filtering by start/end date
Fix for authorize.net to authorize only deposit amount for deposits
Is Reservation is now a required field
Don’t show the deposit sub-total on checkout unless there is a deposit
PDF shows just start/end date once per order not per product if there is only one start/end date for the order. Same for admin view order page
Default send/return report to today’s dates
Adjust rentals admin menu putting stuff under Rental Queue or Reservations for better organization
Error check if admin adds serial numbers that the product is set to serial number tracking
Allow $0 rental prices (some clients want to rent out stuff for free)
Fix for IE on product page for IE versions 9 or older it was not loading the calendars correctly

Version 1.1 (For Release July 2)

Send & Return overhaul for faster management - will all be done from Sales > Orders and be quicker to do. Click "Ship" or "Return" and put in the quantity of each item you are shipping and returning. We will also be adding on new filters to this page for late shipments or late returns.

Site wide blackout dates

Only show start/end date once on the order view and PDF invoice if the order uses the same start/end dates for the whole order to save space

Email logging/debugger for checking that your send/return emails and return reminders are sent

Quantity calendar icon on manage products page to quickly check the availability by date of products without having to go to the separate quantity report

Global rental dates on customer side - a setting allowing customers to chose the rental dates once for the whole order rather than on the product page

Extend rental & buyout rental product features

Responsive (Mobile Friendly) Professional Rental Hire Magento Template For $199

Looking to get started with a professional design template? That default Magento template is pretty tired - we'll have to agree! We can install a Rocket Theme Magento template for you for $299. Checkout the designs below.

Templates:

NOTE: Each Design has styles you can chose to vary the colors (chose the style drop down Style changer usually on the top right of each template):

Of course you still need to purchase a license for our rental system if you don't have one already :) for $499 if you want to use our rental system, but this could be the way to go if you don't want a full customized template. If you need help customizing the designs our hourly rates are $85/hour for things like changing the logo, putting in custom images, etc however the admin panel for the template will probably get you by mostly for doing these type of changes without needing knowledge of web programming.

Friday, April 26, 2013

10 Rental Software System MUST HAVES

Looking for a good rental software system to run your rental hire business? Make sure that the software you chose has the following features:

1. Role based permissions for the administrators. This means that you can create different administration logins that can access only the areas of the admin they need to have access to. Your marketing login might only be able to access your blog. Your data entry person can only access the product catalog. The login for yourself will probably have access to everything.

2. Overview Rental Inventory Calendar to show where all your rental inventory is by day, week, month. Should show how many items are available, and click to show the details of where the inventory is by client.

3. Social Integration. The system should be able to integrate with facebook logins and likes, google + logins and likes, and all other popular social networks.

4. Email confirmations of orders, send confirmations, return confirmations, and return reminders.

5. Product Filtering. Ability to filter products by rental price, product attributes (colors, sizes, categories, features) on the customer side so customers can quickly find what they want.

6. Loads Fast. The rental system you chose should have page load speeds of 1 second or less per page. Studies show that customer buy more from quickly loading web sites.

7. Open Source Rental System. The code for your rental system should be open source. No two rental businesses are the same. Do you need custom features that are not already offered in your rental system? If so you'll need to make sure your rental software is open source so these new features can be coded in.

8. Serial Number Inventory Tracking. This will make sure you can make barcodes or QR 2 dimensional barcodes to stick to each of your products. If your rental system can't handle serial numbers, you will not be able to accurately track your inventory.

9. Tracking Of Send & Return Of Rental Products. Don't try and customize an existing E-commerce system to add rentals. You'll never be able to do so on-time or on-budget. Critical to any rental system is a different form of tracking inventory. You'll need a page that tracks both the send AND return of your products. E-commerce systems are only built for sending, not returning by default.

10. Integration With Major Rental Shipping & Payment Gateway APIs. Make sure your rental software system ties in with the major shipping services like DHL, UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc. For payment gateways you'll probably need Authorize.net, Paypal, Moneris, Sage Pay, Skrillr, etc. Trying to integrate these APIs from scratch will cost you a lot of time and money.

Rental System Software Free Trial On Your Server

Need a free trial of our rental system software to run on your server? No problem. We are now offering 30 day free trials that you can install on your server. Our rental system software is online based and is a rental extension for the already powerful Magento E-commerce Framework. To run our hire rental system you will need:

Installation of Magento
Ioncube php loader installed on your server: http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php

We'll email you the rental extension with the ioncube encoded license files. You can install it using Magento Connect. To signup just use our free trial form on our pricing page.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Excellent New Magento Book Now Available

May the Magento community rejoice! Finally there is a good book out there to learn how to program Magento. It's no longer necessary to piece together bits and pieces of tutorials from all over the net to learn how to program Magento the right way. The book is Magento PHP Developers Guide by Allan Macgregor. This book excels in many ways. It covers topics that other books on Magento ingore or don't cover well. A few of the things I loved about this book:

Goes step by step through making a real Magento module, not just some hello world or blog
Teaches about Magento testing techniques
How to properly deploy Magento and Magento modules
Covers the admin grid system - how to set them up for new modules or edit them
Magento layout xml files - how they work
First few chapters go over all the Magento codebase in a thorough manner - get up to speed on what you need to know very quickly. Much faster than going through the 40 hour fundamentals of magento screencast.
Covers how to setup Vagrant - though I already had done this it's great to have a resource there for people learning it and how it will help your development

Even if you are already a experienced Magento developer there are sure to be some things for you to learn in here. Obviously Allan researched well this book and is applying the "correct" way of writing Magento modules. If you try and find online tutorials they are often of low quality or plain don't work. This book is different and will save you a lot of time in the Magento learning process. Thanks Allan for writing such a great book! Looking forward to more like this!

I emailed Allan and he emailed back saying he may be writing more books so I'm certainly looking forward to that. It's always been strange to me how such a large E-commerce framework like Magento had such low quality learning resources, but hopefully that will change now!

Book: http://www.packtpub.com/magento-php-developers-guide/book and the official website: http://magedevguide.com/

Magento Rental System

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Project Management Software Recomendation - Active Collab

We've used a great deal of project management systems. The top ones being JIRA and Basecamp. We never really liked them though as for a web development company JIRA felt way to complicated, slow, and hard to navigate. It left a lot to be desired. Basecamp was too simple - things like not being able to prioritize tasks, make sub-tasks, and no direct SVN integration really bothered us.

Well finally we came back to Active Collab - and really we can not recommend it enough! It is SUPER fast loading, has everything a web development company could need for project management, handles SVN, and you don't have to pay per month to use it, just one flat fee of $499. Originally that was what kept us back since we usually just pay the $30 - $50/month fees, but the license fee is worth it and of course saves time in the long run.

So if you aren't sure what project management system to use, make sure to give Active Collab a try! www.activecollab.com

Oh - and if Active Collab developers are reading this - please support private github repos for your source code management tool :)