I purchased the booking stack this morning to use to block time slots for a taekwondo school portrait day. I’ve got it set up and published but am unable to get the stack to automatically block out times that are already booked. I’ve created a booking on Sunday May 27 at 11am but a new user is still able to select that date and time from the drop downs but then receive the notification the time slot is already booked. How do I make it so that time on that day is greyed out or not selectable at all?
Can anyone help me understand why this entry (or any other entry) in the time ranges entry box (copied from the documentation and updated the times) causes the calendar to stop working and the stack to ignore the duration and min/max times?
I managed to get it to work for me. I think the formatting in documentation may be wrong. The second example is [‘3:30pm’, ‘5:16pm’]. Is it possible the colon in the 5:16 was causing issues?
One other question/idea - is it possible to limit the booked times to a specific day? If not, it would be nice to have the option to set the booking stack up for a specific day (e.g. single day events, mini photo sessions, etc.) or limit the booked/busy times to specific days.
If the stack could dynamically change the formatting of booked times and not allow them to be selected in the dropdown menu that would be great! Thanks.
Wanted to touch base. I like the progress of the Booking stack so far. I skimmed through some of these Q&A’s and also checked out the update page. Seems like it’s coming along!
One thing I wanted to confirm was that if someone selects a day and time for a booking, I then have to manually go into RW and block out that day and time so it can not be selected again by someone else, correct? In other words, it won’t automatically block it out for me when someone books a day and time.
Alrighty, I bit the bullet and purchased the Booking stack! Wanted to touch base about some quirks I’ve found and some feature requests.
SPECS
RapidWeaver 8.0.2, Engineer Theme (RW8 built-in theme), Stacks 3.6.1, Booking stack 1.5.0, on a 27” iMac 5K running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6.
GENERAL
I’ve noticed that the fields do not clear automatically. The Name and Email fields are still populated even after the form has been submitted. Even though a confirmation message shows, it’s still a little confusing that the fields are left populated after submission.
I found the .PHP edit file on my own, but it’d be great if there were a “Login” button or “View Bookings” button that would take you directly to the .PHP Edit page for easy access.
It’d be great if there were a Google Sheets integration as well.
FIELD SETTINGS
Having the option for two separate fields for First and Last name. Maybe enabling a selection for “First Name” / “Last Name” fields.
Customized Field 3: Having the option for a custom Field 3… Text box, dropdown selection, radio buttons, etc. I’m a photographer and offer different packages. Having the client simply choose their package from a dropdown selection while booking would be ideal instead of them having to type it in.
Available Date/Days: Being able to declare or customize certain days of the week that are actually available for bookings. I only offer bookings Monday through Friday and not on the weekends. Currently, there is no way of blocking out or declaring certain days that are available/unavailable.
Customized time slots: I only offer three time slots per day- 10am, 1pm, and 4pm. And the maximum Time Interval allowed is currently 60 minutes. So that means 11am, 12pm, 2pm, and 3pm all display but are greyed out because I have “Enable Booked Times” selected. I think upping the Time Interval to 180 minutes or more would solve this so the unavailable times won’t be displayed.
Booked times: If a client books a certain day/time, it’d be great if it would automatically be greyed-out and un-selectable for other clients. Currently, an error message is displayed only after an existing booking is selected and submitted. Ideally, it’d be dynamically and automatically updated and greyed-out after each booking so existing booking times are not selectable. (kind of like the manual “Enable Booked Times” selection, but automatic after each booking)
EMAIL NOTIFICATION SETTINGS
Currently, none of these settings have worked for me at all. I have “Enable Notifications” turned on and have tried three separate email addresses ending with @typierce.com, @mac.com, and @gmail.com all to no avail. I’ve checked inbox, junk, and trash for all addresses and nothing has been delivered. I use Midphase for hosting and currently have the domain I’m testing this stack on listed as a add-on domain. Not sure if that has anything to do with it. But I’ve tried every combination of “Enable Receipts” and “From Email” with different email addresses and notifications turned on and nothing has come through on either end.
It’d be great if there was an option to include the booking details in the receipt email as well.
ALL-IN-ALL
It’s a nice stack with a ton of potential but isn’t quite there yet. Especially at a $40 price point. I know it won’t be a perfect solution for everyone and that a lot goes into building this. These are just my observations and suggestions as an end-user. I’ll reply back if I find anything else. Thanks for taking the time to read this!
Not sure about your hosting companies requirements. Most will not send email to an address other than the domain you are using>. So @mac.com and @gmail.com will probably not work. Since you indicated, you are using another domain than @typierce.com probably won’t work either. Are you able to send from a contact form? Again I don’t know that hosting companies guidelines but the other thing you can do is look for the log files. PHP will not display error messages directly on the web page (by default) but instead puts them to a log.
Thanks for the suggestions and info. A side note: It’s interesting because even on my main domain (typierce.com) I still can’t use my custom email "hi@typierce.com" with Formloom 3 as the To/From email address. Nothing gets sent or delivered even though it’s the same email extension as my domain. And this has been a long standing issue even before I switched to Midphase. I’m at least able to use my @gmail.com email address to send and receive with Formloom 3, but not my custom email address even though it’s on the same domain.
All that to say, I don’t think the To/From email field in the Booking stack has to be To/From a custom email with the same extension as the domain that it’s on. I would assume it’d work with any email address.
Thanks for the feedback @manuvmusic and making updates all the time to this addon so please keep an eye here for updates:
Let me run through your points.
G1) That was added in the cache as some people would refresh their browser so it kept as much data as possible to stop having to type it in again
G2) Good idea but difficult as the way the pages export it’s different every time so you need to follow the steps in the manual to create the button (as you found it)
G3) Good idea and have this already in a BETA version but requires setup on the Google accounts side. So might open a support headache so still thinking how best to do this.
F1-4) Thanks for those and will add more fields in a future update
F5) The auto greying without a database is difficult, one work around is relating to the Google Sheets integration and showing a Google Calendar.
E1) I think that’s something on that server as you’ve discussed with Doug. It should use PHP mail on the server to send it out. Gmail or yahoo should work fine. If it’s not working, please ask the host for their input and send me a DM with server access and I’ll have a test.
E2) Yes we had this but took it away as it was getting long on some emails and some users didn’t like it. Maybe bring it back as an option is a good idea.
Hey Michael! Okay, I finally heard back from Midphase regarding why I’m not receiving email confirmations from the Booking Stack:
It appears your code is using php mailer function, which will not work on your server. Since your mail is not hosted through cPanel you will need to use SMTP connections with your mail form.
Hopefully this will help shed some light on why the email notifications don’t work for me.
Booking Stack doesn’t have SMTP support but I’ll add it to the list for a future update.
In the meantime, could you add a quick email for that site via cPanel. E.g. “notifications@domain” or something just to get emails for that site running through the server?
Can anyone help me to fix this problem with the Booking stack? When I disable the end date in the stack, the following parse error appears:
Parse error : syntax error, unexpected ‘)’ in /private/var/folders/3p/3ld_khfd02sfz083n5npwzvw0000gn/T/com.realmacsoftware.rapidweaver8/RapidWeaver/37588/document-0x6080003fba00/RWDocumentPagePreview/index.php on line 241
Does anyone know how to fix this? I already wrote to Yuzool more the a week ago but I didn’t get a reaction. I use the stack at the moment for a restaurant, so I don’t need an end time. I already have updated to RapidWeaver 8, and I use de the latest version of Booking, but the problem still exists.
