Booking

Overview

The Booking module turns any WordPress page into a self-serve appointment scheduler. Define your services, publish a booking page, and manage every appointment from one panel.

Booking is built for service businesses — consultants, studios, clinics, salons and agencies — that want clients to book (and optionally pay) online without bolting on a separate plugin or a paid scheduling service. Every appointment stays inside your own site.

What you can do

• Create unlimited services, each with its own duration, buffer, price and custom intake fields — or offer several duration & price options per service
• Add providers (staff) and assign them to time slots
• Publish availability as specific-date or recurring weekly time slots with a capacity per slot — one window can serve several services at once
• Take full payment at booking with Stripe, or collect payment on location
• Send automatic confirmation emails to the client and notifications to the provider
• Sync two ways with each provider’s Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar
• Or skip the setup with a no-login calendar subscription — each provider gets a private link/QR that drops bookings onto their phone
• Translate every front-end label, with one-click presets for EN / NL / FR / DE / ES

Requirements & compatibility

Booking runs on any modern WordPress host. Payments and calendar sync use their own free accounts.

Optional integrations

Installation & activation

Booking ships inside WPStack — there’s nothing extra to download. Switch it on per site from the modules panel.

The four building blocks

Booking is made of four connected pieces. Set them up in this order.

Services

A service is the thing clients pick first. Create as many as you like under Bookings → Services.

Providers

Providers are your staff. Add them under Bookings → Providers, then assign them to slots.

Each provider has a name, email, phone and short bio. The bio and name appear on the booking page when a slot is assigned to them. A provider’s email is used for the “new booking” notification.

Calendar subscription (no login)

The easiest way to get appointments onto a provider’s phone — a private calendar link they subscribe to once, with no Google/Outlook login.

Under Settings → Calendar, choose Calendar subscription (no login). Each provider then gets a private ICS feed, shown as a QR code and a copy link on their Providers screen. They scan it (or paste it into Apple, Google or Outlook Calendar once) and every booking appears on their phone automatically. It is read-only and refreshes on the calendar app’s own schedule (about hourly).

• One link works for Apple, Google and Outlook — it’s the standard iCalendar format
• No OAuth, no API keys — nothing to configure per provider
• The link carries a private secret token; Reset link revokes old subscriptions
• The QR is generated on your own server — no external calls; the copy link is the backup

Availability (Slots)

Slots decide when each service is bookable, by which provider, and how many people can book at once.

Specific vs recurring

• Specific — a single calendar date (e.g. a one-off workshop on 12 March).
• Recurring — a weekly schedule with per-day start/end times (e.g. Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00).

Managing bookings

Every appointment appears under Bookings → Bookings, grouped by upcoming, completed, cancelled and past.

• Statuses — confirmed, completed and cancelled. Completing or cancelling removes the event from the provider’s calendar; confirming (re)adds it.
• Reschedule — move a booking to a new date/time; the calendar event moves with it.
• Re-push to Calendar — force a fresh sync of a single booking if it ever drifts.
• Payment status — paid, pending or failed is shown for services paid online.

Settings reference

The Settings screen is split into tabs. Here’s what each one controls.

Embedding the booking page

Place the booking flow anywhere with a shortcode or the Elementor widget.

[wpstack_booking]

[wpstack_booking service="12"]

Payments (Stripe)

Collect payment at booking with Stripe, or take payment on location.

Google Calendar setup

Two-way sync using your own Google API credentials — bookings appear on the provider’s calendar, and their busy events block those times.

Create the Google credentials

Connect each provider

Outlook Calendar setup

Two-way sync with Outlook / Microsoft 365 using Microsoft Graph and your own app registration.

Register the app

Connect each provider

Exactly like Google: open a provider, Generate Authorization Link, send it, and they click Connect with Microsoft. The provider row then shows Outlook (connected).

How calendar sync works

The details behind two-way sync — worth knowing before you rely on it.

• Only one calendar is active — the provider you select in Settings → Calendar (Google or Outlook). Configuring both is fine; only the selected one is ever contacted.
• Bookings push out — confirming a booking creates an event on the provider’s calendar; cancelling/completing removes it.
• Busy events block times — anything marked “busy” on the provider’s calendar hides those times on the booking page.
• Up to ~5 minutes — a manually-added personal event can take up to 5 minutes to start blocking (busy times are cached briefly).
• Tokens stay fresh — access tokens auto-refresh every 50 minutes, so providers don’t need to reconnect.
• Break alerts — if a connection dies (revoked/expired), the site admin gets an email naming the provider with a link to reconnect.

Labels & translation

Every word on the booking page can be changed under Settings → Labels.

Override step names, field labels, buttons, messages and email row labels. A language preset (English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish) fills every label and sets the calendar language in one click — a great starting point you can then tweak.

Webhooks & integrations

Send every booking straight to Make, Zapier, n8n or your own CRM, the moment it happens.

The Connect module can post a booking to any address you give it. That turns a booking into anything you can automate — a row in a spreadsheet, a Slack message to your team, a deal in your CRM, an SMS to the client. No code required.

Events you can subscribe to

For developers

Every event is also a standard WordPress action, so you can handle it in a plugin or your theme instead of sending it anywhere. They fire for bookings made on the website and in the mobile app.

add_action( 'wpstack_booking_status_changed', function ( $booking_id, $new, $old ) {
    if ( 'cancelled' !== $new ) {
        return;
    }
    $booking = WPStack_Booking_DB::get( $booking_id );
    // …free the slot elsewhere, notify a colleague, write to your own table…
}, 10, 3 );

Frequently asked questions

Troubleshooting

The most common issues and how to clear them.

Changelog