We have released a new feature in our Booking & Appointment plugin for WooCommerce v2.6. The plugin now supports 2 way Google Calendar Sync. This version was released on 12th April 2016.
This is a quick guideline on how to setup the sync between your Google calendar and bookings on your website.
Setup:
You can find the settings for this feature on the Booking -> Settings page. A new tab is added on the page named ‘Google Calendar Sync’.
Export Booking Settings:
Here we have provided 2 ways to export the bookings to your Google calendar, namely Sync Automatically and Sync Manually. Sync Automatically will export all bookings to your Google calendar as the orders are placed. You will need to setup your Google calendar based on the instructions given on the page.
Sync Manually mode will allow the admin to add the booking events to their Google calendar manually. When a new order is placed, the New Customer order email received by the admin will have buttons added by our plugin to export the booking to the Google calendar or to other calendar applications.
Import Booking Settings:
This allows the admin to import all the events from their Google Calendar to their WordPress website & into the plugin. For importing the events, you will need to add the ics Feed Url that you can find from your Google calendar settings. All the future events from the current date will be imported.
All these events will be listed on a new page Import Bookings. You can find this page under Booking -> Import Bookings menu.
After the events are imported from your Google calendar, they will appear on the Imported Bookings page. The site admin will need to map these events to the bookable products.
You can map these events to the WooCommerce bookable products by selecting the products from the drop down menu, where all the bookable products will be listed. Once selected, click on the Map Event button. Only after mapping the event to the product, the availability of the product will be affected. You can also discard the imported event by clicking on the Discard Event button.
Conclusion
This was one of the most widely asked-for feature on our Feedback system & rightly so. It will allow the site admin to integrate their bookings with practically any external system through Google Calendar.
For site owners who use sites like AirBnB, etc. for listing their products, it will allow them to maintain all their bookings on the Google Calendar thereby giving a single view of bookings from all their sources.
It will also help you to add bookings to your website without having to go to “Add Order” page manually. Just by adding the event to the Google Calendar, the booking can be imported in your WordPress website.
