Description

Bookingistic turns your WordPress site into a premium booking system — for strategy calls, salons, clinics, tutors, fitness trainers, consultants, and any appointment-based business.

Visit Bookingistic.com for the live product overview, setup guidance, and booking workflow examples.

Booking form designs (pick per site or per shortcode)

Classic — two-panel layout with service details
Modern Card — elevated card with soft shadows, perfect for coaches
Split Hero — bold gradient header, great for salons and clinics
Minimal Inline — borderless, blends into any theme

Switch templates instantly under Bookingistic Appearance, or per form: [bookingistic service="consult" template="modern"].

Three calendar views

Month grid — the classic date picker
Pills — horizontal next-14-days scroller (mobile-first)
List — upcoming dates with Today / Tomorrow labels

One-click industry presets

Salon/Spa, Clinic/Medical, Fitness/Yoga, Tutoring, Consulting, Home Services — each applies a tuned design, brand color, and scheduling defaults (slot interval, notice window, booking horizon). Everything stays editable.

Elementor widget

Drag-and-drop the Bookingistic Form widget with live controls for service, template, and calendar view. (Appears automatically when Elementor is active.)

Real scheduling engine

Services with duration, buffers, price, category, manual/auto confirmation
Staff with per-day working hours, days off, holidays, daily booking limits
Double-booking guard, min-notice, max-advance window, slot interval
Timezone-aware: slots render in the visitor’s timezone
Cancel & reschedule via signed, expiring links — no account needed

Google Calendar

Free on every site: .ics attachments + one-click “Add to Google Calendar” links
Two-way sync (bring your own free Google OAuth client): confirmed bookings push to each staff member’s calendar, and their external events automatically block booking slots. Refreshed every 15 minutes.

Email automation

Branded HTML confirmations, reminders (hourly cron), cancellation and reschedule notices. Automation rules fire on booking events; every send is logged. Site owners can add their own custom footer text under Settings.

Payments (bring your own gateway)

Paid services collect payment through a WooCommerce order per booking — customers pay with any payment method WooCommerce already supports, and payment status flows back to the booking automatically (paid booking confirmed).
Payment ledger: every attempt (pending, paid, refunded, failed) is logged under Bookingistic Payments.
Developer gateways: plug additional providers into the bookingistic_payment_gateways filter — no core billing decision is hard-coded.

Developer-friendly

REST API at /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/ (services, staff, availability, bookings)
Actions & filters: bookingistic_booking_confirmed, bookingistic_available_slots, bookingistic_external_busy_intervals, bookingistic_can_remove_branding, and more
Clean custom tables; opt-in data removal on uninstall (BOOKINGISTIC_DELETE_DATA)
Backward compatible with the v1 wpistic_booking CPT and legacy REST route

Shortcode

[bookingistic service="strategy-call"]
[bookingistic service_id="1"]
[bookingistic template="split" calendar_view="pills"]

REST API

GET  /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/services
GET  /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/availability?service_id=N&date=YYYY-MM-DD
POST /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/bookings
POST /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/bookings/{id}/reschedule
GET  /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/payments
GET  /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/payments/gateways

External services

Google Calendar (optional, per staff member)

This plugin can connect to Google Calendar so each staff member can two-way sync their bookings. Nothing is sent to Google until a staff member explicitly clicks “Connect Google Calendar” in the staff editor and authorizes access with their own free Google OAuth client.

What it is used for: pushing confirmed bookings to the connected Google Calendar, and reading that calendar’s free/busy blocks so external events block booking slots.
What data is sent and when: booking details (service name, date/time, customer name and notes) are sent when a booking is confirmed, rescheduled, or deleted, for staff members who connected their calendar. OAuth tokens are stored in the site’s own database.
Which services are contacted: Google’s OAuth endpoints (accounts.google.com, oauth2.googleapis.com) and the Google Calendar API (www.googleapis.com).
Google Terms of Service: https://policies.google.com/terms
Google Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Screenshots

Calendar — month view with filters and booking events

Calendar — week view for staff planning — Calendar — month view with filters and booking events

Installation

Upload the bookingistic folder to /wp-content/plugins/, or install via Plugins Add New.
Activate the plugin.
Open Bookingistic Appearance and pick an industry preset (or your own design).
Add your services under Bookingistic Services.
Drop [bookingistic service="your-service"] on any page — or use the Elementor widget.

Upgrading from 1.x? Your existing bookings and the legacy form keep working.

FAQ

Does the free version include payments?: Yes — via WooCommerce. Turn on “WooCommerce Orders” under Bookingistic Payments and every paid booking creates a WooCommerce order the customer can check out with (cards, PayPal, bank transfer — whatever your store supports). Payment status syncs back to the booking, and confirmed payment auto-confirms the booking. Direct Stripe/PayPal gateways without WooCommerce are on the roadmap.
Does Google Calendar sync need a paid service?: No. The deep-link + .ics features work everywhere. Two-way sync uses your own free Google OAuth client credentials (setup guide under Bookingistic Integrations Google Calendar).
Can each staff member have their own calendar?: Yes — per-day working hours, days off, daily limits, and individual Google Calendar connections.
Will it slow my site down?: No external CDN calls, no jQuery dependency, one small CSS + one JS file, loaded only where the form appears.

Reviews

There are no reviews for this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

“Bookingistic” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Shuvo Chandra Sarker

Translate “Bookingistic” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

2.6.0

New: premium booking-form design language across all four form designs and all three calendar views — elevated card, step progress (“Step 1 of 3”), service summary card with price pill, day tiles, time pills and a live “Continue with Tue at 1:30 PM ” button
New: motion — slide/fade step transitions, spring-like day/time selection, skeleton shimmer while availability loads, staggered time pills, crossfading CTA text, animated success checkmark, floating toast cards and hover micro-interactions; pure CSS + vanilla JS, no new libraries or external requests, and fully disabled under prefers-reduced-motion
Accessibility: arrow-key / Home / End navigation for days, times and hosts; full-date labels on day buttons; polite live region for loading and availability; focus moves to each new step; visible focus rings; forced-colors support
Changed: Modern Card is the default design and #1b7257 the default accent for sites that have never saved Appearance settings; saved settings, shortcode attributes and the Elementor widget are unchanged
Security: every custom-table SQL query now goes through $wpdb->prepare() with placeholders; table and column identifiers are bound with %i (whitelisted columns only), optional filters are value-bound instead of concatenated, and ORDER BY uses a strict column whitelist. No phpcs:ignore remains on any SQL-preparation (PreparedSQL / PreparedSQLPlaceholders / InterpolatedNotPrepared) sniff.
Performance: reads from the plugin’s own tables are now object-cached (wp_cache_get/wp_cache_set, one cache group per table) and invalidated through a per-table last_changed key on every write (create, update, delete, status change, cancel, payment updates, schema install/upgrade, uninstall, and at the end of every booking transaction). Availability, overlap/double-booking, daily-limit, slot-lock, slug-uniqueness and reminder checks always read live data. The remaining Plugin Check DirectQuery notices carry narrow line-level ignores with the reason stated. No functional changes.
Fixed: PHP 8.1+ “Passing null to htmlspecialchars()” deprecation notice when editing a staff member with an empty bio (found while testing on MySQL/MariaDB).
Changed: the booking form uses the system UI font stack; no web font is loaded or referenced
Hardening: admin form input (staff hours, days off, phone, integration settings) is sanitized with core functions before validation, admin pagination output is passed through wp_kses_post(), Google Calendar ICS files are written through WP_Filesystem, the cron schedule is registered next to its callback, and uninstall (with BOOKINGISTIC_DELETE_DATA) also removes the plugin’s transients. Plugin Check (with experimental checks) and PHPCS (WordPress standard) report no errors or warnings.

2.5.5

Fixed: REST requests from the booking form and the admin calendar now work on sites using plain permalinks (the WordPress default on a fresh install) — endpoint URLs are built with a proper query-string join instead of plain concatenation, which previously produced “No route was found matching the URL and request method” on every booking-form and calendar request

2.5.4

Hardening: numeric superglobal reads now go through absint()/floatval()/sanitize_key() instead of raw casts, satisfying the stricter WordPress Coding Standards rulesets used by the latest Plugin Check and the WordPress.org review Playground — the plugin reports 0 errors and 0 warnings under it

2.5.3

Hardening: every superglobal read is now unslashed and sanitized (or explicitly cast) — admin pages, list filters, and the public cancel/reschedule/pay links
Hardening: all admin templates now use plugin-prefixed variable names; read-only display filters are annotated for the WordPress coding standards
Fixed: removed a leftover duplicate “Footer text” field on the Settings screen that referenced the removed 2.5.1 branding gate
Dev: plugin now reports 0 errors and 0 warnings under the Plugin Check (PCP) static analysis suite

2.5.2

Fixed: the Google Calendar sync cron event is now scheduled correctly on a fresh activation — the custom “every 15 minutes” interval is registered before scheduling (previously the interval was only registered after activation, so the event was silently skipped on new installs)
Security: every admin save and action handler (settings, services, staff, bookings, email automations, integrations, appearance) now verifies a capability before processing, in addition to the existing nonce checks — users without the matching Bookingistic capability get a 403

2.5.1

Removed the email footer branding and its license gate — every shipped feature is now free and fully enabled (WordPress.org guidelines)
Security: staff email addresses are no longer exposed by the public REST endpoints
Security: client IP detection for rate limiting now uses only the direct connection address unless the site explicitly opts in to trusted proxy headers, and all header input is sanitized
Security: legacy form nonce is now sanitized before verification; admin error notices sanitize input before escaping
Privacy: email .ics attachments are written to the system temp directory with random names and deleted after sending — no booking data in the public uploads folder
Fixed: appearance screen styles load through the standard enqueue system
Fixed: removed the redundant translation loader (WordPress.org loads translations automatically)
Brand: plugin links now point to bookingistic.com

2.5.0

Fixed: /wp-json/bookingistic/v1/payments/status now accepts the signed link’s t parameter (previously only read token, so plugin-issued links always returned 410)
Security: pay-now links now expire after 90 days — the token embeds its expiry under an HMAC; previously a leaked pay link stayed valid forever
Security: Google Calendar OAuth tokens are now encrypted at rest (authenticated secretbox keyed from the site salt); existing tokens migrate transparently on the next save
New: race-safe booking — concurrent submissions for the same staff member are serialized with a row lock and the availability re-check runs inside the transaction, preventing double-booking under simultaneous submits (InnoDB; silently degrades to check-then-insert on MyISAM)
Dev: standalone test suite under tests/ (run php tests/run-all.php) covering payment token expiry, crypto round-trip, and deposit math

2.4.0

New: premium admin UI — every Bookingistic screen restyled with a consistent design system (page headers with taglines, card-based panels, refined tables, status pills, sticky save bar)
New: Integrations page rebuilt as an animated card grid — icon, description, Connected/Not connected pill, hover lift, and staggered fade-in (pure CSS, respects prefers-reduced-motion)
New: dashboard, bookings, services, staff, customers, and customer profiles now show live stat cards (real counts from your data)
New: Reports screen with bookings-by-status summary and top services (replaces the Phase 2 placeholder)
Tweak: legacy “Bookings (v1)” menu removed from the admin sidebar (data and the legacy REST endpoint are untouched; developers can restore it with the bookingistic_legacy_bookings_show_ui filter)
Tweak: admin stylesheet rebuilt around CSS variables matching the WordPress admin palette; no external fonts or CDNs

2.3.0

New: Payments module — WooCommerce Orders gateway with enable/disable switch under Bookingistic Payments
New: payment ledger — every payment attempt (pending/paid/refunded/failed) recorded per booking, with admin screen and REST endpoints (/payments, /payments/gateways, /payments/status)
New: bookingistic_payment_gateways (alias bookingistic_gateways), bookingistic_payment_recorded, bookingistic_payment_currency filters — gateway registry is fully pluggable
New: deposits — per-service deposit percentage; only the deposit is charged upfront (deposit_paid status), supported across forms, admin and REST
New: signed pay-now links (?bookingistic_action=pay, HMAC token, 410 on bad token) + [bookingistic_payment id email] shortcode with Pay now button
New: booking form success screen shows a Pay now button when a gateway is connected, or pay-later instructions otherwise
New: {payment_link} email merge tag now carries the booking’s signed pay link
New: admin manual actions — Mark paid / Refund on payment records (nonce + capability checked) for offline payments
New: paid bookings that receive payment are confirmed automatically (consistent with the WooCommerce integration flow)

2.2.0

New: 4 booking form templates — Classic, Modern Card, Split Hero, Minimal Inline (Appearance page + shortcode/Elementor override)
New: 3 calendar views — month grid, 14-day pills, upcoming list
New: one-click industry presets with live preview (salon, clinic, fitness, tutoring, consulting, home services)
New: brand accent color + corner radius controls
New: Elementor widget with live template/calendar controls
New: Google Calendar two-way sync — per-staff OAuth connect, booking push, freebusy blocking, 15-min refresh
New: Appearance admin page with live preview
New: bookingistic_gcal_sync 15-minute cron; bookingistic_external_busy_intervals filter
Improved: refreshed readme, i18n strings, POT file
Fixed: staff REST responses no longer expose calendar token metadata

2.1.0

Version alignment release (matches the distributed 2.1.0 package).

2.0.0

Phase 1 rebuild: custom tables, modular OOP architecture, availability engine,
frontend booking form with side calendar, full REST namespace, email automations
with branding helper, admin UI, signed cancel & reschedule links.

1.0.0

Initial v1 Strategy Call lead-capture plugin.