In this document:
Introduction
There are many different ways to display your booking calendars on your site. You can use shortcodes or modules from your page builders. Below we’ll outline all the methods to display the calendar on your site.
Note on the Default Scheduling Page
After installation and activation of the plugin, we create a default booking page. Find it by going to WP Dashboard > Pages > Schedule an Appointment page. Or, www.yoursite.com/appointments.
We recommend you DO NOT use this default booking page for front-end use by customers. Instead, please use one of the methods listed below to display the booking calendar on your site.
This page includes only the Booking Calendar – it doesn’t include the header, footer, and/or sidebar for your site. This page also does not have any links back to any other page of your site.
When a theme or layout is too complex to display the Booking Calendar, this will be a reliable way to book. Since we strip out the theme, this is also a great way to avoid distractions when troubleshooting.
Display All Your Booking Calendars with the Default Shortcode
The Booking Calendar can be embedded in any post or page using our general shortcode.
Use a plain text block or shortcode block or widget to embed the Booking Calendar with the following shortcode:
[ssa_booking]How the Booking Calendars Looks on Your Site
By default, the [ssa_booking] shortcode displays a list of Appointment Types (if you have more than one) for your customers to choose from.
Use the Reorder button in the SSA Appointment Types page to organize by dragging and dropping elements in the list. The way they’re ordered is how they’re displayed to your visitors.
Display a Specific Booking Calendar with a Shortcode
To limit the Booking Calendar to one specific Appointment Type – go to the bottom of the Appointment Type Settings and copy the shortcode with the slug included.
The shortcode should look something like this:
[ssa_booking type=the-slug-for-this-appointment-type]How the Single Booking Calendar Looks On Your Site
Unlike the general shortcode, this doesn’t show a button before someone can see the date selection screen. The end-user automatically sees the calendar to select a date.
Display a Subset of Booking Calendars
To list out a subset of your booking calendars, you can use the types attribute to choose which ones are displayed. The types attribute uses the slugs for each appointment type.
So for example, if your appointment type slugs are –
- slug-1
- slug-2
- slug-3
You can use the shortcode like this to only list out the slug-1 and slug-3 appointment types:
[ssa_booking types='slug-1,slug-3']Make sure that there are no spaces within the quotation marks. Doing something like this, “slug-1, slug-2, slug-3”, won’t work since there are spaces between the commas and slug names.
Display Using Page Builders and the Appointments Module
If you’re using one of the page builders listed below, you could also use our Appointments block/widget.
- Classic WordPress editor
- Gutenberg/ WordPress Block Editor
- Elementor
- Beaver Builder
- Divi
- Visual Composer
Display the Booking Calendar in a Different Language
The default shortcode displays the Booking Calendar in your site’s default language.
However, you can override your site’s default language by using the following shortcode format:
[ssa_booking ssa_locale="language_Code_Here"]Where you’ll need to replace language_code_here with the code for your language pack.
See the complete list of languages with their corresponding code here. Notice the language code highlighted in yellow underneath each language description:
For example, to display your booking calendar in Danish, the shortcode looks like this:
[ssa_booking ssa_locale="da_DK"]
Your language must be in our language pack list, if not you’ll need to contribute translations to your language pack. Here’s a guide on how to Translate your Booking Calendar.
