Scheduling and Booking plugins
I have been maintaining a web site using WordPress for a guild in a MMORPG. There will be an Olympics-related special missions in the game starting on Saturday. For 13 days, there will be 6 events each day, such as healing, scavenging, dueling, hunting, etc. The guild wants to have a sign up page, so that they can coordinate and support the different members looking to medal in an event (and win prizes). I figured that there must be a plug-in to do something like this, such as making reservations at a hotel or scheduling employees at a business. I did some preliminary research, which confirmed this, and said sure, no problem.
But as I started looking at the individual plugins more closely over the next couple of hours, I slowly figured out that there was nothing out there that would work for me. So to record this for the future, and possibly provide feedback for plugin developers, I’m going to blog my evaluation here.
To start, here were my requirements.
- Must haves
- Sign ups for multiple assets (e.g. shifts or rooms)
- Limit sign ups to registered users. (Failing this, populate the sign up form with user data. Failing this, allow reservations with minimal data.)
- Free or almost free
- Not essential, but nice to have
- A schedule view that could be inserted on a page
- Easy enough for an ogre to use
- Limit sign ups to certain days
- Users can remove themselves
- Lists of alternate guild members who can take the shift
Easy Reservations
[Plugin Home] [WP plugin site]
Calendar view for Easy Reservations
Easy Reservations is a full-featured plugin that can be used to handle reservations for hotels, car rentals, events, B&Bs, appointments or conferences. The web site is pretty and there is lots of support and documentation. The main drawback is the free version on works with one asset/resource. If I want to take bookings for more than one event, I would have to pay 119€ (yes, Euro). That was a complete non-starter.
Basic Rota Management
This plugin is used by the Transilvania International Film Festival to manage their volunteers. The administrator can set up events, dates, set staffing requirements, and breaks. Users can enter their availability on their profile pages. Pretty good so far.
There were couple deal breakers for me. There was no way to put the volunteer assignment on a sub-page. By default, it became the front page of the WordPress installation. (In their defense, the creator was willing to make this edit if asked.) Another issue was that the software automatically assigned volunteers to shifts. I can see how this could be a good thing, but not in my case.
Booking Calendar & Appointment Scheduler
[WP plugin site]
This plugin also provides lots of professional features plus customer relationship management and business analytics. However, it’s basically a front for Appointy, an SaaS for appointments. I wasn’t excited about the idea of registering with an external web site for what I think should be something simple.
Bookings
This offering is very similar to the one above. The plugin was a front end to Bookings by Zingiri, which was a SaaS, and I would need to get an API key. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sign up for this and the plugin took care of obtaining the key for me. The main problem with this plugin is it lacked a good visualization of the bookings. There were a couple of views available in the administration panel, but I can’t expect my users to be able to navigate this deep into WordPress. I really needed to display this on a page, but this feature is not currently available. (They are however quite happy to sell one to me.)
WP Simple Booking Calendar
[Plugin home] [WP plugin site]
The WP Simple Booking Calendar was simple and easy to use, but too simple. It only showed whether an asset was booked or available. I needed to show who was our designated guild member on a given day, so we could support him or her.
There were a few other plugins that were intended for managing the calendar of one person, such as CP Appointment Calendar, and one for the schedule for on-air djs
So that was two hours of my life… Next, I’m going to look into plugins to create forms, such as Formidable Forms and Form Maker, and web sites that specialize in volunteer signups. In the case of the latter, I definitely don’t want something that forces people to register.
Post Script. I ended up doing with Volunteer Spot. I maintained security by emailing the link to the sign up page and putting the link on a protected page on the WordPress site. Guild members loved it.