Description
Zoe Booking turns your WordPress site into a complete booking system in about five minutes. Add services and staff, drop the form on any page, and start taking appointments — free reservations, hosted online payments or the WooCommerce checkout.
Three ways to take bookings
- Standalone — instant reservations (confirmed automatically or pending your approval). No other plugin needed.
- Standalone — pay online — customers pay on a hosted checkout (Square built in; Stripe and PayPal come with the PRO add-on). The booking is created only after the payment is verified server-side; if the slot was taken while paying, the charge is refunded automatically.
- WooCommerce (PRO add-on) — bookings ride through the cart and checkout as products, with prefilled customer details.
A booking form people enjoy using
- Four friendly steps: service date & time details confirm, with a live price summary.
- Five layouts (sidebar with photo, numbered process timeline, top stepper, slim progress bar, icon rail) and five design skins (Classic, Minimal outline, Soft, Dark, Glass).
- Popup mode — show just a button, the form opens in an elegant modal.
- Calendar days fill up visually as they get booked; time slots show remaining group spots.
- Phone field with a country dial-code picker, validated email, optional customer notes.
- Dedicated Elementor widget — layout, design skin, colours, typography, spacing and the sidebar photo are all editable straight in the Elementor panel. A Gutenberg block and the
[ms_booking]shortcode render the same form everywhere else. - A service catalogue with
[ms_services]or its own Elementor widget: your services as cards (photo, description, duration, price) in list, grid or large-card layouts, with optional category filters, search and sorting — and a Book button that opens the form on that service. - 12 or 24-hour time, any currency symbol and position, renameable terminology (Service Class, Person Coach…), single-person mode.
Run the business, not the admin
- A visual month calendar with colour-coded bookings, day panel and one-click manual bookings.
- A bookings list tinted by status, with print-ready details sheets, one-click deletes and a CSV export of whatever your filters select.
- A dashboard with 30-day revenue, bookings, average value and cancellation-rate charts.
- Emails with .ics calendar invites, automatic reminders, and a QR code customers scan to drop the appointment into their phone’s calendar.
Schedules that fit real people
- A weekly schedule per person, the services they offer, and time off as single days or whole date ranges.
- Special days — different hours on one particular date. A coach who is free on Tuesday this week and Saturday the next does not need a weekly grid that fits nobody: pick the date, set the hours. A special day also opens a day that is normally closed, and a day off always wins over it, so a holiday can never be reopened by accident.
- Free slots are worked out from the schedule, the service length (plus any gap after it) and the bookings you already have — two customers can never grab the same slot, even if they pay at the very same moment.
Staff panel (PRO add-on)
Each team member gets their own small corner of the WordPress admin: their own appointments (with quick status changes), their own month calendar, and their own schedule — weekly hours, days off and special days they manage themselves. No settings, no payments, no revenue, nobody else’s bookings. You create a WordPress account with the “Zoe Staff” role, link it on the Staff screen, and that is the whole setup.
Feature switchboard
Every capability has an on/off switch under Zoe Booking Features, so the plugin stays exactly as light as you need: duration variants, taxes, online meeting links, service extras, group appointments, recurring series, per-staff calendar feeds, online payments, QR add-to-calendar, WhatsApp links and the customer panel.
Events & tickets (PRO add-on)
Events (workshops, openings, concerts) with a ticket pool, image and description — sold through any booking mode and displayed with the Events widget or [ms_events] shortcode in list, grid or standard layouts. An event can run on one date or on many: a workshop series stays a single event, customers choose their date at checkout, and every date sells its own seats. Events are not tied to anyone’s working hours, so a date in a quiet month needs no schedule juggling.
Customer panel
A front-end account area with passwordless magic-link sign-in: customers see their appointments and tickets, cancel online, download invoices, edit their details — and exercise their GDPR rights (export or permanently delete their data) themselves. [ms_customer_panel] or the Elementor widget.
Free vs Premium
The free plugin is complete on its own: unlimited services and staff, the full booking form (all layouts, skins and popup mode), the service catalogue, the visual month calendar, the bookings list with CSV export and the dashboard, weekly schedules with days off and special days, Square online payments, email notifications and reminders, .ics calendar invites, QR add-to-calendar, per-staff calendar feeds, taxes, duration variants, service extras, group appointments, recurring series, WhatsApp links, online-meeting links, the customer panel and full translations.
Zoe Booking PRO (a separate add-on, not included in this plugin) adds: the staff panel, Stripe & PayPal payments, WooCommerce checkout, discount coupons, waiting lists, multiple locations, invoices, refunds and events & tickets.
External services
Zoe Booking runs entirely on your own site and stores all data in your WordPress database. It connects to external services only when you enable the corresponding feature and add your own API keys:
- Stripe (api.stripe.com) — when Stripe is your payment gateway: creating checkout sessions, verifying payments and issuing refunds. Data sent: booking amount, currency, item name and the customer’s email. Terms, Privacy.
- PayPal (api-m.paypal.com) — when PayPal is your gateway: creating and capturing orders and issuing refunds. Data sent: amount, currency, item name. Terms, Privacy.
- Square (connect.squareup.com) — when Square is your gateway: creating payment links, verifying orders and issuing refunds. Data sent: amount, currency, item name, buyer email. Terms, Privacy.
The optional WhatsApp feature only renders standard wa.me links — no data is transmitted until the user taps the link.
- zoebooking.com (our own licensing service) — used only for the optional PRO license. Activating or re-checking a PRO license key sends that key and your site’s hostname to zoebooking.com to verify it; nothing is sent while no key is entered, and no third-party script is ever loaded. The “Get PRO” admin page simply links to our website. With an activated key, the optional “Install PRO now” button downloads the PRO package you purchased from zoebooking.com (the request carries only your license key) and installs it — nothing is ever downloaded without that explicit click. Terms, Privacy.
Nothing else calls home: the QR code renderer and the flag font ship inside the plugin.
Screenshots
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- Zoe Booking Form
Installation
- Upload the
zoebookingfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install it from the Plugins screen. - Activate the plugin — a Zoe Booking menu with a welcome dashboard appears.
- Add a Service and a Staff member (with a weekly schedule).
- Put the form on a page: the Zoe Booking Elementor widget, the Gutenberg block or
[ms_booking]. - Pick your booking mode under Zoe Booking Settings and flip on any features you need.
FAQ
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Do I need WooCommerce?
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No. Standalone mode works on its own, and online payments (Stripe / PayPal / Square) work without WooCommerce too. Selling bookings through the WooCommerce cart and checkout is an optional mode available in Zoe Booking PRO.
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Does it work with Elementor?
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Yes — Zoe Booking ships a dedicated Elementor widget with full Style controls: layouts, design skins, colours, typography and spacing are all configurable per widget, live in the editor. No Elementor? The Gutenberg block and the
[ms_booking]shortcode render the exact same form. -
How do online payments stay safe?
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The reservation is only written after the gateway confirms the payment server-side. Availability is re-checked at that moment — if the slot was taken while the customer was paying, the charge is refunded automatically.
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Can customers manage their own bookings?
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Yes — enable the Customer Panel feature. Customers sign in with a magic email link (no passwords, no WordPress accounts), see their appointments and tickets, cancel, download invoices and edit or delete their personal data.
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Can my team see their own bookings without seeing everything else?
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Yes — that is the Staff panel (PRO). Give the person a WordPress account with the “Zoe Staff” role and link it on the Staff screen. They then see only their own appointments and calendar, and manage their own hours, days off and special days. Settings, payments, revenue and everyone else’s bookings stay out of reach.
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What if someone works different hours on one particular date?
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Add a special day on the Staff screen: a date with its own start and end time. It replaces the weekly hours for that date and can also open a day that is normally closed. Days off always win, so a holiday cannot be reopened by mistake.
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Yes — set a group capacity on the service. Slots show the remaining spots and prices are per person.
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Are reminders sent automatically?
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Yes, when enabled in Settings. They run on WordPress cron, so they fire on site traffic; for precise timing use a real system cron.
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Is it translation-ready?
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Fully — gettext throughout (text domain
zoebooking), and it ships with complete Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish translations out of the box. The Terminology settings additionally allow quick renames (Service Class…) without touching translation files. -
Does uninstalling remove my data?
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Options are cleaned up. Bookings, services, staff and events are only deleted if you tick “Delete all data on uninstall” in Settings first.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Appointment Booking Calendar & Scheduling – Zoe Booking” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Appointment Booking Calendar & Scheduling – Zoe Booking” has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Appointment Booking Calendar & Scheduling – Zoe Booking” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.6.1
- Fixed: if a PRO licence lapses, pages holding the
[ms_events]shortcode showed the raw text “[ms_events]” to visitors, because WordPress prints shortcodes it does not recognise. Those pages now simply leave the section out until the licence is active again.
1.6.0
- New: Special days — different hours on one particular date, for the weeks that refuse to repeat. A coach free on Tuesday this week and Saturday the next no longer needs a weekly grid that fits nobody: pick the date, set the hours, done. A special day also opens a day that is normally closed, and a day off always wins over it, so a holiday can never be reopened by accident.
- New (PRO): My Calendar in the Staff panel — the same month grid the owner uses, showing only that person’s own appointments, with the day panel and quick status changes.
- Staff members set their own special days from their panel, without touching anything else on the site.
1.5.1
- Fixed (PRO): on sites running WooCommerce, a staff member logging in was redirected to the WooCommerce “My account” page and could never reach the Staff Panel — WooCommerce locks anyone without shop permissions out of the WordPress admin. Staff accounts are now allowed into their own panel (and nowhere else).
- Staff now land straight on their own bookings after signing in, instead of on the WordPress profile screen.
- The Staff Panel got a proper Zoe header that greets the team member by name, so it is always obvious whose bookings are on screen — and the view links (Upcoming / Past / All) no longer collide with the page title.
- Linking a WordPress account that already belonged to another staff profile now says so: one account runs one profile, and the previous link is reported as moved instead of disappearing quietly.
1.5.0
- New (PRO): Staff Panel — each team member gets their own limited wp-admin area. Create a WordPress account with the new “Zoe Staff” role, link it on the Staff edit screen, and that person sees only their own bookings (with quick status updates) plus their own weekly schedule and time off. No settings, no payments, nobody else’s data.
- New: a “Regenerate link” button next to the private calendar-feed URL (on the Staff edit screen and in the Staff Panel) — one click invalidates the old .ics link when someone leaves the team.
- Hardening: staff save/delete now verify the record really is a staff member before writing.
1.4.1
- New (PRO): a fourth Events layout — “Banner” feature rows with a large date badge (rounded square, circle or minimal tile), the date · time · price line, a tickets-left pill and a pill-shaped Get tickets button with an arrow.
- New (PRO): an optional corner decoration image on Banner cards, fading in from the right edge — set one image for all cards, or let each event’s photo take that role.
- The badge colours, size, decoration width and opacity are all adjustable in the Elementor widget’s new Banner layout section; the
[ms_events]shortcode acceptslayout="banner",badge="circle"andornament="<image url>".
1.4.0
- New: a service catalogue —
[ms_services](and a matching Elementor widget) shows your services as cards with photo, description, duration and price, in list, grid or large-card layouts, with optional category filters, search and sorting. - New: each card’s Book button opens the booking form with that service already selected — and when only one team member offers it, they are picked automatically, so the customer lands straight on the calendar.
- New: services now have a Short description field, shown on those cards.
- Services with duration variants advertise “from ” instead of a base price the checkout would never charge.
1.3.0
- New (PRO): an event can now run on SEVERAL dates. A workshop series is one event with one description, image and price — add a date per session, and customers pick the date they want when they buy. Ticket capacity counts per date, so each session sells its own seats.
- New (PRO): “Duplicate” on the Events screen — copy an event with all its settings and just set the new dates.
- Existing single-date events keep working exactly as before; nothing to migrate.
1.2.3
- New: export the bookings list to CSV — one click exports exactly what your filters select (staff, service, date range, status, search), with prices, customer details and payment references, ready for Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets or your accountant.
1.2.2
- New: one-click “Install PRO now” — after activating a PRO license key, the PRO package downloads and installs itself (no more manual ZIP upload). A manual-upload fallback remains for sites where dashboard installs are disabled.
- New: buying PRO from the panel now brings you straight back to WordPress after checkout, with the license key activated automatically.
- Fixed: with an active license key but the PRO package not yet installed, the panel now shows the License page with clear next steps instead of the pricing page.
1.2.1
- The “Get support” button now opens your email client (hello@zoebooking.com) — quicker help, no separate ticket portal.
1.2.0
- The plugin no longer bundles any third-party SDK — a fully self-contained install. Licensing & checkout for the separate PRO version now run on Lemon Squeezy (nothing loads or phones home unless you open the Get PRO page or enter a license key).
- New License page (PRO): activate or deactivate your key, re-check its status and jump to the Lemon Squeezy customer portal to manage billing.
1.1.4
- New (PRO): show a single event (or a hand-picked set) —
[ms_events ids="123"], an event picker in the Elementor Events widget, and a copy-ready shortcode column on the Events screen. - New (PRO): events are now clearly separated from appointments — All/Appointments/Events tabs and a per-event filter on the Bookings list, an “Event” badge on ticket rows, and the calendar collapses each event into a single chip with a sold/capacity counter plus grouped attendee lists in the day panel.
1.1.3
- New: full Dutch (Nederlands) translation — the plugin now ships in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish.
- Pricing page starts on the Monthly cycle; small admin polish (no tier badge in the free version).
1.1.2
- Free version got bigger: service extras, group appointments, recurring series, per-staff calendar feeds (.ics), WhatsApp links and the customer panel are now fully included — and the staff limit is gone (unlimited team).
- Security: customer-panel, calendar and invoice access tokens are now signed with a plugin-generated secret instead of WordPress auth salts.
- Under the hood: every admin and front-end script/style now loads through the WordPress enqueue APIs.
1.1.1
- Fixed: bundled translations (de/fr/es/it/pl) were not loading — the form and admin stayed in English on non-English sites.
- Fixed: dropdown panels could render permanently open on block themes (e.g. Twenty Twenty-Five) that ship no
[hidden]CSS reset. - Fixed: theme styles no longer distort the form’s line icons (global
svg { fill }rules), underline the contact links or outline the collapse button. - New: “Date & time box max height” option — in Settings Appearance (desktop + mobile) and in the Elementor widget (responsive).
- Improved: service-picker categories stack vertically on small screens instead of a horizontal scroller.
1.1.0
- First public release on WordPress.org.
- Stability, performance and UI polish across the admin panel and booking form.
- Consistent 12/24-hour time and date formatting everywhere in the panel.
- Updated German, French, Spanish, Italian and Polish translations.
0.3.0
- Online payments: Stripe Checkout, PayPal and Square — hosted checkouts with server-side verification and automatic slot-conflict refunds.
- Events & tickets with an Elementor widget (list / grid / standard) and ticket sales through every booking mode.
- Customer panel with magic-link sign-in, self-service cancellations, invoices and GDPR data export/erasure.
- New form layouts (process timeline, progress bar, icon rail), design skins (outline, soft, dark, glass) and popup mode.
- Discount coupons, service extras, group appointments, recurring series, waiting list, multiple locations, invoices, per-staff calendar feeds, refunds, WhatsApp links, taxes, duration variants, QR add-to-calendar — all behind feature switches.
- Dashboard reports, currency & time-format settings, phone country picker, customer notes, mobile polish and a recolourable admin panel.
0.2.0
- Rebranded to Zoe Booking with a single, unified admin menu.
- Custom Services & Staff screens, visual month calendar, dual Standalone / WooCommerce mode.
0.1.0
- Initial booking engine, WooCommerce product-type integration, Elementor widget.