Home » Development » API » WooCommerce Appointments Enhanced with an Availability Calendar
WooCommerce Appointments is a commercial booking plugin that allows you to setup appointments with WooCommerce. It has full integration into Google calendar to track appointments of your staff.
Staff availability can be set globally or via each staff members profile. While this is nice, I was looking for an option to actually handle availability via another Google Calendar as well. That was a must have feature for a current project.
What do you do, if that feature is not available yet ? You poke the code!
The magic entry point for the staff availability is the user meta „_wc_appointment_availability„, which is made available through includes/class-wc-product-appointment-staff.php.
A couple of weeks ago I asked support for a simple filter hook to alter the availability on demand from the outside.
The development team added the feature in one of the latest releases, making wc_appointments_staff_availability the entry point for my custom availability changes.
You can either pull Google Calendar Events directly through the Google Calendar API or use the available iCal export option. In this quick example I will use the private calendar iCal export file.
Lets setup a quick clean calendar, called „Availability“. So simple and catchy :)
For this example I am using the PHP ICS Parser, but any other parser will do. Install it via composer: composer require johngrogg/ics-parser.
Lets create a quick little plugin to get us going and save it to /wp-content/plugins/CustomAvailability/smile.php
Its time to get the data into the system. I am only pulling and altering the availability for one single user in this example, the user with the USERID „3“. This should provide you with a good starting point.
The example pulls and parses the ics file on every load, use a transient or REDIS to store data and only refresh in certain intervals.
Hope this gets you started! I build a simple interface around it, with a lot of more rule options. This makes the setup for each staff member a brise. Now each of them can setup a calendar easily and provide me with the ics link :) WooCommerce Appointments rocks …
Alexander Gräf
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Ich bin ein Full-Stack-Entwickler. Meine Expertise umfasst:
Ich liebe die Entwicklung, das Design und kenne mich auch mit Serverarchitekturen aus. Ich würde mich nie vollständig fühlen, wenn einer der Bereiche fehlen würde.
Ich habe ein breites Interessengebiet, deshalb tauche ich ständig in neue Technologien ein und erweitere mein Wissen, wo immer es nötig ist. Die Technologien entwickeln sich schnell und ich genieße es, die neuesten Technologien zu nutzen.
Abgesehen davon bin ich ein friedliebender Kerl, der versucht, Leute um sich herum zu haben, die dasselbe denken. Ich glaube wirklich an das Prinzip: "Wenn man jemandem hilft, wird einem jemand helfen, wenn man es braucht."