• paul

    (@paulbeakvisioncom)


    One of the better calendars/booking forms I’ve seen but the free version does not seem to work properly. Definitely does not work as good as the demo on the website (maybe it’s running on an older version of WP?). Either way, usability wise it’s still in beta. Will wait for version 2 to come out.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author DOTonPAPER

    (@dotonpaper)

    Hello,

    May I ask what problems do you have?

    Thank you

    Thread Starter paul

    (@paulbeakvisioncom)

    For one, there is this weird way of selecting calendar items (including the hours). First click starts the selection process, then second click finishes it. Very unintuitive. Especially confusing when trying to manage the booking form in the backend.

    Saving the changes to multiple selections also takes a while. And it doesn’t save properly either. Changes applied for a whole month resulted with one week not being available, yet everything else in that month saved ok. It seems I have to press “reset” before applying any changes (but that doesn’t work 100% of the time either). And the “reset” button then jumps a month ahead for some reason and I am not able to return to the current month without refreshing the whole page. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to work and I’m just missing something, but the interface does seem a little over complicated and buggy.

    Once the reservations are made, in the backend there is a little number on the envelope letting you know there’s a new reservation. Well,.. it doesn’t actually disappear once you approve it. When you get 10+ reservations, it starts being a job in itself just to check which ones have been approved and which ones haven’t. Imagine there were 50+ reservations!

    Another thing I noticed is that it tires to send a notification email via STMP to wpdevelop.com. Why? Especially since my STMP settings in the booking form are set to “disabled”. I guess I should have read the Terms of Use Agreement… “We will keep a copy of your reservations for safe keeping 😉 “

    I’m sure some more testing would result in more bugs. Too bad. It’s a neat little calendar. I like it a lot. But it’s not prime time ready. It’s v0.5 I’d say.

    Plugin Author DOTonPAPER

    (@dotonpaper)

    Hello,

    First of all we don’t save your reservations. wpdevelop.com is not our domain and we don’t keep peoples reservations. This is bad and I don’t think WordPress agrees with it. (View this profile http://profiles.wordpress.org/wpdevelop/ and you will see who gets your emails). It can’t be from our plugin.

    For Front End you also have a sidebar to select dates. I guess this method can’t satisfy everybody, but I receive some very positive feedback regarding this type of selection.

    We can’t find any problems when saving the data. Everything saves and resets OK.

    We are working on another reservation display. Currently only the reservations that are accepted or pending are displayed.

    Regards

    Thread Starter paul

    (@paulbeakvisioncom)

    That is odd. I tried your plugin again and this time it did not use wpdevelop.com. Must be some crossed wires somewhere as I did try that plugin before yours. My apologies.

    I tried the sidebar and it worked great. Actually, I thought just using the sidebar would be all that is needed. Simple, small and straightforward. The calendar with this odd way of multi selection is just confusing. Not good for customers who are trying to spend money on your business.

    I played with the plugin some more and can’t seem to create any reservations anymore. I get the “There are no services available for the period you selected” error now, even though all periods say available in the backend. Resetting the calendar or changing the settings doesn’t get rid of the error.

    As someone who’s tech savvy, I found your plugin fairly easy enough to figure out, but would not expect someone like my mom to be able to operate this (front or back end).

    Don’t get me wrong, your plugin is great but it’s missing a good user interface and user experience. Needs to be thoroughly tested too.

    Plugin Author DOTonPAPER

    (@dotonpaper)

    Hello,

    You need to set availability for days/hours. It is not set by default. This is why the message “There are no services available for the period you selected” appears.

    Thank you for all your feedback. I will take it into consideration for a next update.

    And it doesn’t save properly either. Changes applied for a whole month resulted with one week not being available, yet everything else in that month saved ok.

    I ran into this problem as well, and tracked it down to the fact that trying to save a bunch of bookings at once on the backend is submitting a form with thousands of parameters–and bumping straight into PHP’s default setting of max_input_vars=1000. In my case, I’m trying to save bookings with multiple slots available on each day, with several time slots on each day.

    I can bump up the PHP setting to allow me to save more, but that really isn’t a solution: the code should be encapsulating the data (for example, into a single JSON-encoded value) before submitting it because many people simply won’t be able to change the default value on their server.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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