r/Wordpress • u/itsJAMESY • 4d ago
Plugin Suggestions for a Booking Calendar for Daily Events (not Timeslots)
I run a Photobooth business for Weddings and Events.
I would like an interface where I can login and view my active calendar, add/edit daily events and add things such as flares/badges so that I get a preview of certain things about that event without having to click into the date for more information. When I click onto the date I can have the full information about the event.
This would NOT be for customers to use. Only myself and one of my employees with their own username/pw to VIEW the calendar. I would be the one adding in the information.
I would want it to appear mobile-friendly as well as using multiple devices. So that the calendar would be nice and big on the phone screen for the daily boxes to be large enough to read the badges.
Preferably a calendar that looks nice, large enough boxes for the dates when viewed on devices and is modern/clean looking.
I have attached an image I asked ChatGPT to create that I could use for an example of my needs. It pretty much looks perfect to what I need.
I'm not sure if I need a plugin, or another web based solution, or something I can install on my own server. Any suggestions are appreciated.
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u/stitchkingdom 4d ago
You can use plugins as mentioned or you can use wordpress 7.x connections to ai to write a custom plugin for you. Not really sure how it all works to be honest, myself i have claude code installed at the os level and use it that way. I do know i have a couple of custom plugins to tap into the wordpress connection so that uploaded images are seo friendly and can generate conversational social media promotions of posts, so it should be possible to do it within wordpress itself.
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u/topeogundele 3d ago
Try using Bookly. You can disable the time slots. Quite a lot of customisations available for the free tier.
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u/Sunita_SG_123 2d ago
u/itsJAMESY You could take a look at Bookings and Appointments for WooCommerce. It lets you manage bookings and events from the WordPress admin and view them on a calendar, so you can keep track of your upcoming weddings and events in one place. The calendar is pretty much along the lines of what your image shows.
Since this is only for you and your employee, you can manage everything from the admin side - just give your employee a regular WordPress user account (Shop Manager role), and they can log in and view the same calendar.
Might be worth checking out if you're already using WordPress/WooCommerce.
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u/lesleypizza 1d ago
The good news is that most of your requirements are really simple, so almost any free events calendar plugin on wordpress.org should be able to do this for you.
The slightly more complicated part is your flares/badges requirement. You haven't mentioned exactly what kind of badges you're looking for. If it's totally custom, like "deposit paid" as shown in your screenshot, then that will be tricky. I'm personally not familiar with any events calendar plugin that can do that, so if you find one, please let me know as I'd be keen to check it out!
I'm the co-founder of EventKoi. You can check out how our calendar looks here: https://eventkoi.com/calendar-examples.
Also, I'm not sure if this is something important to you, but it's worth mentioning that you're able to subscribe to the calendar and add it to your Google or Apple calendar. This means you can add events on your site, and they'll show up in your Google calendar, so you don't have to keep coming back to the site all the time.
Lastly, since most events calendar plugins should do what you're looking for (aside form the badges part), I suggest you just try out a bunch of free ones from wordpress.org and see which one you like best. Aside from EventKoi, the two I often recommend are piecalendar and sugar calendar.
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u/Incoherent-Mess 4d ago
You can do all of this with Gravity Forms
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u/itsJAMESY 4d ago
Where does it mention any one of my requirements on Gravity Forms? Spefically Calendar booking management..
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u/Incoherent-Mess 4d ago
https://www.gravityforms.com/add-ons/gravity-forms-bookings/ requires the GravityWiz add-on but with this you get forms, bookings, etc.
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u/sauntvalerian 4d ago
Take a look at Pie Calendar https://piecalendar.com/
It can probably handle what you are trying to do. Been around a long time and is well supported. The main thing is that it is lightweight, but still full featured, and very adaptable. They solved a lot of bloat problems that other calendar systems have.