Guide to the Restaurant Reservations plugin for WordPress

This guide will help you install and configure the plugin for your site.

Further support for this plugin can be found at themeofthecrop.com.

Installation

The following steps describe how to upload the Restaurant Reservations plugin to an existing WordPress installation. If you have not yet installed WordPress, consult the WordPress documentation for more information.

  1. Unpack the restaurant-reservations.zip file. It should create a folder named /restaurant-reservations/.
  2. Upload the /restaurant-reservations/ folder to your WordPress plugin directory at /wp-content/plugins/.
  3. Go to your WordPress admin dashboard at yoursite.com/wp-admin and click the Plugins item in the menu on the left.
  4. Find Restaurant Reservations in the list of Plugins and click the Activate link below the plugin name.

The plugin is now active. Next you'll need to get it setup.

Quick Setup

To get this plugin working as quickly as possible, all you need to do is display the booking form. There are three ways to do this:

  1. Automatically add the booking form to any page on your website. Go to the Booking > Settings page in your admin dashboard. Select one of your pages in the dropdown list for Booking Page. The booking form will automatically be added to that page.
  2. Add the Booking Form widget. Go to Appearance > Widgets and find the Booking Form widget. Add that to any sidebar to display your booking form.
  3. Use the [booking-form] shortcode to add your booking form to any page or post on your website. Simply paste [booking-form] into the content of any page or post.

Once you've done that, your users can submit their bookings. The next section will describe how to view, confirm and reject them in your admin panel.

Manage Bookings

To view, confirm and reject bookings, go to the Bookings page in your admin panel. This will show you all of your bookings with the current status on the right.

On this page you can filter bookings by date, filter bookings by status and change a booking's status. Tip: you can combine filters, so that you are viewing just Pending bookings for Today.

When a new booking is made, it is set to Pending. You can then either set the status to Confirmed or Closed. The user will then receive an email letting them know that their booking was confirmed or rejected.

To change the status of any booking, click the checkbox to the left of the booking. From the Bulk Actions dropdown list, select the appropriate action (ie - Set to Confirmed) and click Apply.

Remember, a user will receive an email notification, so only change the status when you're ready. At the moment, a notification is sent to the user when they make a booking request and when that request is changed from pending to confirmed or pending to closed.

Set the booking schedule

You probably only want to accept bookings when you're open. You may only accept bookings during certain opening hours. You can define scheduling rules to limit when people can submit booking requests.

To do this, go to the Bookings > Settings page in the admin dashboard. On this page, click the Booking Schedule tab.

Under Schedule, click the Add new scheduling rule button. Set the weekdays and opening hours.

These rules are complimentary. That means if you have two rules which occur at different times on the same day, bookings will be accepted during both times. This allows you to set morning and evening hours, for example.

There are three other settings on this page.

Exceptions allows you to specify custom scheduling rules on certain dates. This will help you indicate if you're closed on a holiday or have special opening hours one day.

Early Bookings and Late Bookings allow you to set limits on how early or late people can make bookings. If you don't want to recieve a booking for 4:45pm at 4:40pm, set the Late Bookings setting to something more appropriate.

The settings page

In addition to the Booking Schedule, there are two other settings tabs. These settings allow you to customize messages when people submit a booking, notification emails sent out when bookings are confirmed or rejected, and more.

If you want to receive an admin notification email when a new booking request is made, make sure to check the box next to Admin Notification under the Notificaitons tab.

Extend this plugin

This plugin has been designed from the ground up to be extensible and customizable. There are dozens of hooks to allow you to customize the functionality and output. These include hooks to completely replace the booking form's HTML output, add new settings, add new booking form information, and add your own notifications.

If you have any questions, please contact me.

This plugin is available on GitHub if you would like to contribute pull requests.