Availability Calendar
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More up-to-date documentation for this plugin can now be found here.
The Clearskys.net availability calendar and booking management plugin provides the following functionality.
- Adding, editing and deleting of bookings for a single property.
- Holding of status of bookings (pending, deposit paid, etc).
- Notes area for each booking to hold any additional details.
- Storing of Renters contact details and a separate notes area to store information related to the renter.
- Full text, status and date based searching to enable the quick retrieval of particular bookings.
- Output of none pending bookings as an Availability calendar.
- Full control over styling and format of Availability calendar output.
- Public and Private iCal and RSS Calendar feeds.
- Set the language of the output calendar and feeds (and dates within the administration system separately).
- Show your calendar with a Sunday or Monday start day.
We will be continuously updating and adding to the functionality of this plugin, so if there is something you desperately need or want, then please let us know and we will try to add it to the schedule.
How to install the plugin
Click on the “Download” link above and save the .zip file to a directory of your choice.
Unzip the file and copy the clearskys folder to the wp-content/plugins directory of your Wordpress installation (you need to copy the folder AND the contents, so after uploading to your server there will be a wp-content/plugins/clearskys folder with the plugin files in it).
Login to the administration section of your Wordpress site and go to the Plugins page. Click on Activate next to the plugin labeled “Clearskys.net Booking manager”.
Upgrading the plugin
Warning: If you are currently using the Availability Calendar Widget on your site then BEFORE uploading the new plugin code, please go to the Presentation - Sidebar widgets section of your site and make a note of the pages that your Availability Calendar widget is used and also of the settings and styles you are using with it (click on the options button to the right of the widgets name). This is because the new widget has a different internal system name (due to the new multiple widget functionality) and the existing widget and settings will be lost when the upgrade takes place.
To upgrade (please note the section above) simply copy the contents of the clearskys directory to the existing plugins - clearskys directory. Overwriting any existing files that are there.
Setting up the plugin
The first thing you should do before using the plugin, is to navigate to the Options menu, and click on the new Bookings options sub menu.
The page will look something like this:
Each of the settings at the top section of the page control the output of the calendar to your page. The initial format is to output each month as a table, with unavailable dates marked with a style of “booked”. I will go into more advanced use of these settings in a number of tutorials, and also in a couple of screencasts (technology willing).
The next section of the options page enables you to give your property a specific number. If you are planning on synchronising your local calendar with one or more remote Clearskys.net servers (upcoming functionality), then enter your Clearskys.net assigned property number here. For now, just leave it as 1.
Hackers hint: It is possible to use the plugin to manage the calendars for multiple properties, in fact it is designed for this purpose. We will be adding the required functionality very soon, but with prudent changes to the Property number in the options panel, you can get started straight away.
Lower down on the options page are settings that allow you to setup the URI’s to use for your public and private feeds. More instructions on setting up your Feeds can be found here.
Calendar Languages and start dates
At the bottom of the options page you will find two options to change the language used for the dates in your calendar (and the feeds), and an option to set the weeks start day.
As you can see in the screenshot above, modifying the language and start day options is as simple as selecting the option from the relevant drop down box and then clicking on the Update settings button to save them.
Booking Management
The main administration section of the plugin is found by clicking on the Manage main menu and then on the Bookings submenu.
The main section of the page looks like the image below:
The initial list displayed will be all the bookings that are due to start in the current month, or are currently in progress (such as current long term bookings).
You can change the contents of the list by using the search form on the right hand side of the page:
- Status - Allows you to search for bookings with a specific status.
- Property - Allows you to search for bookings for a specific property.
- Starting in- will allow you to search for bookings starting in a specific month and year.
- Containing - Is a free text field to allow you to specify a phrase or word that the booking should contain. It searches the following fields: Rentor Name, email address, Booking title, booking notes and rentor notes.
Clicking the Delete button on a booking will remove the booking from the database.
Clicking the Edit button on a booking will allow you to edit the selected booking.
Editing / Adding a booking
The Edit and Add a booking forms are identical in look and operation, so I will describe both of them together.
The form looks like the image below:
The form is split into two distinct sections. The area on the top (labeled “Booking Details”) is used to hold information specific to the booking such as the dates, status, a title so that you can easily identify it and any booking specific notes.
The area underneath (labeled “Guest Details”) is used to hold information specific to the renter, such as his/her name, contact details and any guest specific notes (such as number of guests, if a travel cot is required, etc..).
Clicking on the Add or Update button at the bottom of the form will Add (or update) the booking. The system will validate your input to make sure you do not enter invalid dates or email addresses, etc… It will also not allow you to add bookings that overlap with an existing booking.
Displaying your calendar
Your availability calendar can be displayed within a post on your blog, or on a seperate page set aside for the purpose. We have tried to make it as easy as possible to add your calendar without the need for using any php code or programming.
Quick start
The quickest way to add your calendar to a post/page is to enter the following in the HTML of the post/page (you will need to click on the HTML button to access the code):
Change the n to specify the number of months you wish to display. So to display the next 3 months (including the current month) you would enter:
and to view the next 18 months you would enter:
If you are using the plugin for multiple properties, then you can specify the property you wish to display the calendar for by adding the following BEFORE the tag to display the calendar:
Replace the n with the number of the property to use. So, to show the calendar for property number 1, the tag would be:
If you want to have a generic page to show an availability calendar, and want to pass the property number to the page as a GET variable or as part of the URL then you can use the following tags:
To specify the name of the GET variable containing the property number (such as “property”, use the following:
Replace the n with the name of the variable, so for the URL:
http://www.mysite.com/?page_id=3&property=1
the tag would be:
To use a URL segment to specify the property number, you can use the tag:
Replace the n with the number of the url segment to use (starting from 0), so for the following URL:
http://www.mysite.com/availability/1
The segment numbers would be:
0 - www.mysite.com
1 - availability
2 - 1
and the tag would be:
Show some Love…
and finally, if you are really nice you can add the following tag somewhere on your page:
Which will add a link back to our site like below:
powered by clearskys.net
Sample Calendars
I have added a sample calendar here, with some instructions on how it was created.
Instructions on styling your calendar can be found here.
Support for this version
Any questions should be asked in the forum. There will be a separate post for each version of the plugin, but the link on this page will always point to the most recent versions support post.
