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.
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 |
add_filter( 'wc_appointments_staff_availability', 'availability_callback', 10, 3 ); function availability_callback($availability, $staff){ // Your changes here return $availability; } |
You can either pull Google Calendar Events directly through the Google Calendar API or use the available iCal export option. In this quick example I will use the private calendar iCal export file.
Lets setup a quick clean calendar, called “Availability”. So simple and catchy :)
For this example I am using the PHP ICS Parser, but any other parser will do. Install it via composer: composer require johngrogg/ics-parser.
Lets create a quick little plugin to get us going and save it to /wp-content/plugins/CustomAvailability/smile.php
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 |
<?php use ICal\ICal; /* Plugin Name: WooCommerce Appointments - Custom Availability Plugin URI: https://portalzine.de Description: Attach additional Google Calendar for staff availability Version: 1.0 Author: portalZINE NMN Author URI: https://portalzine.de */ require_once(PATH_TO_VENDOR_DIR."vendor/autoload.php"); class StaffCustomAvailability{ function __construct() { add_filter( 'wc_appointments_staff_availability', array($this, 'staffAvailability'), 10, 3 ); } function staffAvailability($availability, $staff){ // Your changes here return $availability; } } $StaffCustomAvailability = new StaffCustomAvailability(); |
Its time to get the data into the system. I am only pulling and altering the availability for one single user in this example, the user with the USERID “3”. This should provide you with a good starting point.
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 |
function staffAvailability($availability, $staff){ // $staff holds the complete user data // $availability is the current set of rules // Only altering availability for USERID 3 if($staff->data->ID == 3){ $newSet = array(); try { // add the private ics file here $ical = new ICal('URL TO PRIVATE ICS FILE', array( 'defaultSpan' => 2, // Default value 'defaultTimeZone' => 'Europe/Berlin', 'defaultWeekStart' => 'MO', // Default value 'disableCharacterReplacement' => false, // Default value 'skipRecurrence' => false, // Default value 'useTimeZoneWithRRules' => false, // Default value )); } catch (\Exception $e) { die($e); } $forceTimeZone = true; $events = $ical->sortEventsWithOrder($ical->events()); // looping through all events foreach ($events as $event) { // Get Start and end date / time information $dtstart = $ical->iCalDateToDateTime($event->dtstart_array[3], $forceTimeZone); $dtend = $ical->iCalDateToDateTime($event->dtend_array[3], $forceTimeZone); // Define new time:range rule // Adding one rule per day // Added Friday to the calendar + event recurring 4 times, which results in 4 new rules for staff member 3 $newSet[] = array( 'type' => "time:range",// rule type used for this example 'appointable' => "yes", '[priority' => 10, 'from' => $dtstart->format('H:i'), // start time 10:00 'to' => $dtend->format('H:i'), // end time 16:00 'from_date' => $dtstart->format('Y-m-d'), // start date - Friday 'to_date' => $dtend->format('Y-m-d') // end date - Friday ); $availability = $newSet; } } return $availability; } |
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 …
I am a full-stack developer. My expertise include:
I love programming, design and know my way around server architecture as well. I would never feel complete, with one of these missing.
I have a broad range of interests, that’s why I constantly dive into new technologies and expand my knowledge where ever required. Technologies are evolving fast and I enjoy using the latest.
Apart from that, I am a peace loving guy who tries to have people around him that think the same. I truly believe in the principle: “If you help someone, someone will help you, when you need it."
Looks great, thanks for sharing ;)
You are welcome … always enjoy plugins that are open to external tweaks :)
Hi Alex,
Great tips and thanks.
One Question. How to show Auto-select First Available Day on product loop at shop page?
Take a look here
Thanks in Advance
Hi,
you are better off asking that question to their support. I would have to check their latest documentation or parse the code to find a workaround, which there always is ;) .
Cheers
Alex