Movable Type Projects

Premier Sport booking system

Premier Sport provides coaching for children in primary schools across the country. They needed a system to manage all the courses they run, and bookings on those courses. Also needed was an online booking system which parents could use to book their children directly onto courses.

Database schema: courses, schools, coaches, children, bookings, payments are all managed by the CMS

Underpinning a successful system of this kind is an appropriate database design.

Designing a database is part science, part experience. Primarily, the entities in the database must reflect the real-world which is being modelled, but many aspects of design are also determined by how the system is to be used.

For instance, whether something is to be an entity in its own right, or simply an attribute of another entity, is often a complex choice to make (a person’s boss may be just a field of a table, or may be a table in its own right, depending on the requirements of the system).

For the online booking, Google Maps was chosen as the easiest way for parents to be able to locate courses running close to them. Parents can enter their postcode or location, and a map shows courses at the nearest dozen or so venues. Ajax techniques are used to present details of courses of interest when the parent clicks on a location marker.

The site was developed with PHP + MySQL/PDO, and the online booking part can be seen at bookings.premiersport.org.