I’m searching for an Open Source online scheduling solution for my church, and I’m having little luck finding it. I’m hoping someone out there in the blogosphere can help.

Here’s what we need:

• Ideally, it needs to work with Joomla. But if it does everything else in this list, I’ll use it anyway.
• It needs to show what’s going on and when for a congregation of 800 people (with around 20 rooms).
• It needs to let registered site users request a room and a time.
• It needs to have a back end where church staff can approve, disapprove and edit space requests.  (Currently, they get an email and have to manually enter the reservation themselves.)  Think of the emails and phone calls this would save.

Anyone have a solution?  Or a pointer to a solution?
There are at least a dozen almost-solutions available for Joomla. Perhaps I should say “a dozen potential solutions,” but I’m cranky. The Joomla discussion boards are no help: the predominant response (when there is one) seems to be “well, you need to try them all out.” Well, I’m not going to try out twelve or fifteen possibilities.  Not when someone (a developer maybe?) should be able to tell me “Yes, this will do what you need,” or “No, it will do everything you need except this.”

Open Source software has a reputation for having bad documentation.  Yet I haven’t run into that until now.  Major Joomla extensions like Community Builder and iJoomla have good documentation available, and by “good documentation” I mean better than Microsoft.  Most WordPress plugins have good support too, if not by the developer than by an enthusiastic user.

But then there is poor Open Source documentation.  Poor documentation is helpful when you already know how the product works. Which is to say it is not helpful at all.  And lordy I think I’ve stumbled upon some.