Appointment Booking Calendar & Scheduling – Zoe Booking

Registro de cambios

1.8.1

• Fixed: moving in from Amelia or Bookly turned waiting lists into real appointments. Both plugins keep waiting-list requests in the same table as bookings, marked with their own status — «waiting» in Amelia, «waitlisted» in Bookly — and neither holds a time slot for them. Zoe did not recognise either, so it imported them as confirmed appointments, which DO hold a slot: a calendar could arrive from the migration with times blocked that nobody had ever booked. Those entries are now left where they belong and reported in the summary, so you can see what was passed over.
• Fixed: an unrecognised status from the other plugin no longer becomes a confirmed appointment. If either plugin adds a status we have not seen, the booking is imported as Pending and listed in the summary for you to check, rather than quietly taking a slot as though it were confirmed.
• The column and table names the move-in wizard looks for have been checked against both plugins’ own installers — all 5 tables and 28 fields for Amelia, all 6 tables and 35 fields for Bookly.

1.8.0

• New (PRO): Deposits — take part of the price online when the booking is made and collect the rest at the appointment. A percentage or a fixed amount, set globally with a per-service override. The appointment never changes its price: the dashboard, the commission report and invoices keep counting it at full value, while the booking summary, the confirmation email and the printed sheet all show «Deposit due now» and «Balance due at the appointment» lines. A deposit of 100% simply means paying in full, and a fixed deposit larger than the price falls back to charging the whole thing — turning the dial to either end never breaks a checkout.
• New (PRO): Pay by link — one click on a booking’s Details page emails the customer a secure link that opens a checkout for exactly what their booking still owes: the balance a deposit left behind, or the whole price of a booking you typed in by hand. The link carries no personal data, survives until it is paid, and after payment turns into a small receipt page. Customers with something outstanding also get a «Pay» button in their customer panel, so a balance can settle itself without you lifting a finger. Refunding a booking that was paid in two charges (deposit + balance) refunds both.
• New (PRO): No-show tracking — a «No-show» status for the appointments nobody turned up to, one click on the status pill (staff can mark their own unpaid ones from the staff panel). The booking sheet then shows that customer’s record — «missed 2 of 9 past appointments» — and the new-booking email warns you when a repeat offender books again, at the exact moment you could still ask for a deposit. No-shows never count as revenue on the dashboard and never earn staff commission; marking one sends the customer nothing.
• New: Move in from Amelia or Bookly — a new screen that finds either plugin on your site and copies your services, staff and appointments into Zoe in one click. Free on purpose: retyping years of appointments is the thing that stops people trying a different booking plugin at all. Preview before committing; your old plugin is read-only throughout and left exactly as it was, so you can compare the two and change your mind. Imported appointments are silent — nobody is emailed about a booking they made months ago — and re-running is safe, because anything already moved in is recognised and skipped, letting a large calendar arrive over several passes. The importer reads the other plugin’s real column names rather than assuming them, so a version that differs slightly degrades to a missing field instead of a broken import.
• New (PRO): SMS & WhatsApp messages — automatic confirmations, reminders and cancellation notices sent as text messages, by SMS or WhatsApp. They go through your own Twilio account, from your own number, so you pay Twilio’s list price with nothing added on top — no credits to buy from us. Three editable messages with placeholders for the customer, service, staff member, date, time and site name. Reminders use the timing you already set for reminder emails, and a customer who left only a phone number now gets a reminder as well — previously reminders needed an email address. Numbers are normalised into international format however the customer typed them, and a message that cannot be sent never affects the booking: the reason is recorded on it.
• New (PRO): Zoom meetings per booking — connect your own Zoom account once and every booking gets a real meeting of its own, sent in the confirmation email and the calendar invite, instead of one link shared by every customer. Set it per service: no meeting, one fixed link, or a new meeting each time. Moving an appointment moves its meeting, cancelling gives it back, and each occurrence of a recurring series gets its own. Connecting uses a Server-to-Server OAuth app you create inside your own Zoom account — three values to copy, no app review, no redirect URL — and a «Test connection» button that names the account you reached. If Zoom is unreachable the booking still goes through and the reason is recorded on it: a customer is worth more than a meeting link.
• New (PRO): Team appointments — several people on one appointment, for the jobs that genuinely take two: a four-hands massage, a cleaning crew, a workshop with an assistant. Set «People required» on the service; customers still pick one person and a time exactly as before, but a slot is only offered when enough colleagues who perform that service are also free, and Zoe books the whole team. Everyone on it is properly busy — it blocks each member’s calendar, feed and staff panel — while only the lead can move or re-status it, and moving it keeps the same crew. The commission report splits the price equally between them, each at their own rate, so the total still equals what the appointment was worth.
• New (PRO): the staff panel on the front end — put [ms_staff_panel] on a page and your team reaches their appointments, calendar, availability and profile without ever opening the WordPress admin. The same data, the same permissions and the same accounts; the four screens become tabs, and anyone not signed in gets a sign-in form that returns them to the panel rather than the dashboard. Worth having because the WordPress admin is where WooCommerce, security plugins, two-factor gates and «hide wp-admin» tools all get in your team’s way. The admin screens are untouched for the sites they already suit.
• New: the bookings table now records how much money actually arrived for each booking separately from its price — the details sheet shows «Paid online» and «Balance due» whenever they differ.
• Fixed: the dashboard charts under-drew your busy days. The line was smoothed in a way that treated each day as a hint rather than a value, so it never quite reached its own peaks — a spike of 19 bookings was drawn about a fifth of the chart below where it belonged, and the dot you get on hover floated above the line it was supposed to mark. The line now passes exactly through every day, and can no longer bulge above the busiest one or dip below zero.
• Fixed: the popup ignored your Layout & skin. Opening the booking form in a popup moved it to the end of the page so a sticky header could not trap it — but the layout, skin and button styling live on the element around the form, and that element stayed behind. The popup therefore always opened in the default sidebar layout, whatever you had chosen, and no amount of clearing caches helped because nothing was cached wrong. The styling now travels with the popup. This affected every popup: the shortcode, the block, the Elementor widget and the one opened from a Parallax Slider button.
• Fixed: a service’s buffer before is now recorded on each booking, so the gap in FRONT of an appointment is protected the way the gap after it already was. Until now nothing stopped the next customer from booking into somebody’s setup or travel time — the same class of bug as the buffer-after fix in 1.7.0, at the other end of the appointment. If you use buffers before a service, expect slightly fewer slots offered: that is the setting finally doing what it says. Bookings made before this update keep behaving exactly as they did.
• Fixed: refunding one appointment of a recurring series paid with a single charge could hand back every charge while cancelling only that one appointment, if its balance had been settled separately. The whole series is now cancelled together, and each row keeps a record of what was actually charged to it.
• Fixed: the schema upgrade now also runs on the front end. A background auto-update could otherwise land a new version without anyone opening wp-admin, and a booking taken before the new columns existed failed to save — after the customer had paid.
• Fixed: the PRO pricing screen showed a hard-coded «from $4.08/mo» with no indication it was the annual price per month. It is now derived from the annual price and labelled «billed annually», so the headline can never contradict the plans listed under it.
• Docs: the FAQ no longer tells you to install an SMTP plugin (Zoe has SMTP built in), the Services table documents both buffers plus the commission and deposit overrides, the GDPR section covers the consent checkbox, and the previously unwritten limits are stated — minimum notice up to 2160 hours, booking window up to 3650 days, 30 saved design presets, 2000-character private notes, and the 180-day horizon of the «earliest available» search.
• Improved: booking status labels are now translatable everywhere (they were shown as raw capitalised English in a few places).

1.7.0

• New: Import bookings from a CSV — move your calendar over from a spreadsheet or another booking plugin, customers included. Zoe recognises the usual column names, reads several date and time formats, and always offers a dry run first: it reads the whole file, tells you exactly what would happen and writes nothing. Services and people are matched by name and never created for you. Imports are silent — nobody is emailed about an appointment they made months ago somewhere else.
• New: Private notes on a booking — «always 15 minutes late», «prefers the quiet room». Yours alone: the customer never sees it, and neither does the staff panel.
• New: Conversion tracking — announce completed bookings to the analytics your site already runs (a zoe_booking dataLayer event, a GA4 purchase, a Meta Pixel Schedule). Zoe loads no tracking script and contacts nobody; it only speaks to a tag that is already on the page. Off by default.
• New (PRO): You decide what staff can do — five switches under Settings → What staff can do: change statuses, move appointments, manage their own hours, see the customer’s phone number, edit their own name and photo. Everything starts switched on, so nothing changes when you update; untick what you would rather keep. Each one is enforced on the server, not just hidden from the screen.
• New (PRO): a «today» strip at the top of the staff panel — how many appointments, how many are behind them, and what is next — and a My Profile page where they can change the name and photo customers see. Uploading a photo does not give them the media library.
• New: Move an appointment — reschedule from the calendar day panel instead of deleting and re-booking. Pick a date, pick from the free times, done. The booking keeps its id, its customer, its price and its payment, and the customer is emailed a fresh calendar invite for the new time. Staff can move their own appointments from their panel (PRO), except ones that have been paid for — those stay with the owner.
• New (PRO): Earnings & commissions — a per-person report of appointments, revenue, the commission you owe and what you keep, for any date range, with a CSV export. Set a percentage or a fixed rate per person; a service can override it when its margin is different. Figures come from the price saved with each booking, so raising a price next month never rewrites last month. Cancelled bookings and refunded charges are left out. It reports what is owed — Zoe never moves money.
• New (PRO): Design presets — a complete look in one click: colours, layout, skin, shape and spacing together. Nine to choose from — Zoe Classic, Nordic, Midnight, Blush, Atelier, Clinic, Terracotta, Mono and Botanical. Applying one only fills the Appearance fields, so nothing changes on your site until you press Save. You can also save your own design as a preset and carry it to another site. Every one of those settings stays free and fully editable by hand; «Neutral», which clears them all back to the defaults, is free too.
• New: Minimum notice — refuse bookings made too close to the appointment. Set it to two hours and nobody can take a slot that starts in ten minutes. Works across midnight, so a two-day notice correctly rules out tomorrow as well.
• New: Booking window — how far into the future the calendar opens. Thirty days keeps customers inside the next month; leave it at 0 for no limit.
• New: Buffer before a service — the gap you need in front of an appointment for setup, travel or preparing the room. Sits alongside the existing buffer after.
• New: «Earliest available» — one tap on the booking form jumps straight to the first free slot instead of making customers page through a calendar.
• New: Spam protection for the booking form — a decoy field no human ever sees, plus a cap on how many bookings one visitor can make per hour. The public form writes a row and sends mail on every submission, so this keeps a script out of your calendar and off your mail server. Logged-in users are never counted.
• Fixed: «Buffer after» did not actually keep the gap free. The buffer was saved with the booking but ignored when the next customer’s slots were worked out, so a 15-minute clean-up break could be booked straight over. Buffers now hold in the customer calendar, in the manual «+ Add booking» screen and in every payment mode.
• Fixed: in WooCommerce mode the booking request was only checked for collisions, never against the schedule itself — a tampered request could place an appointment outside working hours or on a day off. It now goes through the same validation as the other two modes.

1.6.1

• Fixed: if a PRO licence lapses, pages holding the [ms_events] shortcode showed the raw text «[ms_events]» to visitors, because WordPress prints shortcodes it does not recognise. Those pages now simply leave the section out until the licence is active again.

1.6.0

• New: Special days — different hours on one particular date, for the weeks that refuse to repeat. A coach free on Tuesday this week and Saturday the next no longer needs a weekly grid that fits nobody: pick the date, set the hours, done. A special day also opens a day that is normally closed, and a day off always wins over it, so a holiday can never be reopened by accident.
• New (PRO): My Calendar in the Staff panel — the same month grid the owner uses, showing only that person’s own appointments, with the day panel and quick status changes.
• Staff members set their own special days from their panel, without touching anything else on the site.

1.5.1

• Fixed (PRO): on sites running WooCommerce, a staff member logging in was redirected to the WooCommerce «My account» page and could never reach the Staff Panel — WooCommerce locks anyone without shop permissions out of the WordPress admin. Staff accounts are now allowed into their own panel (and nowhere else).
• Staff now land straight on their own bookings after signing in, instead of on the WordPress profile screen.
• The Staff Panel got a proper Zoe header that greets the team member by name, so it is always obvious whose bookings are on screen — and the view links (Upcoming / Past / All) no longer collide with the page title.
• Linking a WordPress account that already belonged to another staff profile now says so: one account runs one profile, and the previous link is reported as moved instead of disappearing quietly.

1.5.0

• New (PRO): Staff Panel — each team member gets their own limited wp-admin area. Create a WordPress account with the new «Zoe Staff» role, link it on the Staff edit screen, and that person sees only their own bookings (with quick status updates) plus their own weekly schedule and time off. No settings, no payments, nobody else’s data.
• New: a «Regenerate link» button next to the private calendar-feed URL (on the Staff edit screen and in the Staff Panel) — one click invalidates the old .ics link when someone leaves the team.
• Hardening: staff save/delete now verify the record really is a staff member before writing.

1.4.1

• New (PRO): a fourth Events layout — «Banner» feature rows with a large date badge (rounded square, circle or minimal tile), the date · time · price line, a tickets-left pill and a pill-shaped Get tickets button with an arrow.
• New (PRO): an optional corner decoration image on Banner cards, fading in from the right edge — set one image for all cards, or let each event’s photo take that role.
• The badge colours, size, decoration width and opacity are all adjustable in the Elementor widget’s new Banner layout section; the [ms_events] shortcode accepts layout="banner", badge="circle" and ornament="<image url>".

1.4.0

• New: a service catalogue — [ms_services] (and a matching Elementor widget) shows your services as cards with photo, description, duration and price, in list, grid or large-card layouts, with optional category filters, search and sorting.
• New: each card’s Book button opens the booking form with that service already selected — and when only one team member offers it, they are picked automatically, so the customer lands straight on the calendar.
• New: services now have a Short description field, shown on those cards.
• Services with duration variants advertise «from » instead of a base price the checkout would never charge.

1.3.0

• New (PRO): an event can now run on SEVERAL dates. A workshop series is one event with one description, image and price — add a date per session, and customers pick the date they want when they buy. Ticket capacity counts per date, so each session sells its own seats.
• New (PRO): «Duplicate» on the Events screen — copy an event with all its settings and just set the new dates.
• Existing single-date events keep working exactly as before; nothing to migrate.

1.2.3

• New: export the bookings list to CSV — one click exports exactly what your filters select (staff, service, date range, status, search), with prices, customer details and payment references, ready for Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets or your accountant.

1.2.2

• New: one-click «Install PRO now» — after activating a PRO license key, the PRO package downloads and installs itself (no more manual ZIP upload). A manual-upload fallback remains for sites where dashboard installs are disabled.
• New: buying PRO from the panel now brings you straight back to WordPress after checkout, with the license key activated automatically.
• Fixed: with an active license key but the PRO package not yet installed, the panel now shows the License page with clear next steps instead of the pricing page.

1.2.1

• The «Get support» button now opens your email client (hello@zoebooking.com) — quicker help, no separate ticket portal.

1.2.0

• The plugin no longer bundles any third-party SDK — a fully self-contained install. Licensing & checkout for the separate PRO version now run on Lemon Squeezy (nothing loads or phones home unless you open the Get PRO page or enter a license key).
• New License page (PRO): activate or deactivate your key, re-check its status and jump to the Lemon Squeezy customer portal to manage billing.

1.1.4

• New (PRO): show a single event (or a hand-picked set) — [ms_events ids="123"], an event picker in the Elementor Events widget, and a copy-ready shortcode column on the Events screen.
• New (PRO): events are now clearly separated from appointments — All/Appointments/Events tabs and a per-event filter on the Bookings list, an «Event» badge on ticket rows, and the calendar collapses each event into a single chip with a sold/capacity counter plus grouped attendee lists in the day panel.

1.1.3

• New: full Dutch (Nederlands) translation — the plugin now ships in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish.
• Pricing page starts on the Monthly cycle; small admin polish (no tier badge in the free version).

1.1.2

• Free version got bigger: service extras, group appointments, recurring series, per-staff calendar feeds (.ics), WhatsApp links and the customer panel are now fully included — and the staff limit is gone (unlimited team).
• Security: customer-panel, calendar and invoice access tokens are now signed with a plugin-generated secret instead of WordPress auth salts.
• Under the hood: every admin and front-end script/style now loads through the WordPress enqueue APIs.

1.1.1

• Fixed: bundled translations (de/fr/es/it/pl) were not loading — the form and admin stayed in English on non-English sites.
• Fixed: dropdown panels could render permanently open on block themes (e.g. Twenty Twenty-Five) that ship no [hidden] CSS reset.
• Fixed: theme styles no longer distort the form’s line icons (global svg { fill } rules), underline the contact links or outline the collapse button.
• New: «Date & time box max height» option — in Settings → Appearance (desktop + mobile) and in the Elementor widget (responsive).
• Improved: service-picker categories stack vertically on small screens instead of a horizontal scroller.

1.1.0

• First public release on WordPress.org.
• Stability, performance and UI polish across the admin panel and booking form.
• Consistent 12/24-hour time and date formatting everywhere in the panel.
• Updated German, French, Spanish, Italian and Polish translations.

0.3.0

• Online payments: Stripe Checkout, PayPal and Square — hosted checkouts with server-side verification and automatic slot-conflict refunds.
• Events & tickets with an Elementor widget (list / grid / standard) and ticket sales through every booking mode.
• Customer panel with magic-link sign-in, self-service cancellations, invoices and GDPR data export/erasure.
• New form layouts (process timeline, progress bar, icon rail), design skins (outline, soft, dark, glass) and popup mode.
• Discount coupons, service extras, group appointments, recurring series, waiting list, multiple locations, invoices, per-staff calendar feeds, refunds, WhatsApp links, taxes, duration variants, QR add-to-calendar — all behind feature switches.
• Dashboard reports, currency & time-format settings, phone country picker, customer notes, mobile polish and a recolourable admin panel.

0.2.0

• Rebranded to Zoe Booking with a single, unified admin menu.
• Custom Services & Staff screens, visual month calendar, dual Standalone / WooCommerce mode.

0.1.0

• Initial booking engine, WooCommerce product-type integration, Elementor widget.