Completely New Availability / Capacity engine

• The calendar now dynamically loads bookings with smooth animations, enhancing the overall speed and user experience.
• The system is now highly proactive in preventing double bookings. It checks availability at multiple stages, whether it's during calendar loading or when users submit bookings. This ensures that double bookings are effectively eliminated. Even if multiple users attempt bookings for the same date/time from different locations at the same time.

Introducing the Dark Theme for Booking Form

• With this new option, you can seamlessly integrate your booking form into your website's design. This Theme automatically selects the appropriate calendar and time picker skins, adjusts the colors of your booking form fields, labels, text, and other UI elements.
• If you prefer Dark design, now you can select it
• To enable the Dark Theme, head to the Settings General Page, find the "Form Options" section, and select "Dark" from the "Color Theme" dropdown.

Performance improvements.

• We've supercharged Booking Calendar with significant speed improvements. Compared to previous updates.
• Page loading now happens 34% to 78% faster. The speed boost varies depending on the number of bookings and number of calendars on your page (multiple calendars in paid versions of Booking Calendar).
• Server request execution speed has improved from 63% to 94% when you load your initial calendar.
• We've streamlined the system to reduce the number of SQL requests for your initial page loading by 49% to a staggering 89%.
• All these speed enhancements have been tested with 500 active bookings.

Booking Confirmation Section

• Introduced a new Booking Confirmation section that provides users with a summary of their booking details, making it easy for users to confirm their reservations after completing the booking process. This feature allows users to quickly review essential booking information. 'Booking confirmation' section located on the Booking > Settings General page. Previously, it was located in the 'Form' section as 'Thank you' message/page.

Enhancements in Settings Interface

• Structured General Settings Page: Redesigned the General Settings page to enhance user experience. The new layout includes a clear navigation column that displays the specific section you click on, making it easier to understand settings, quickly find specific options, and simplify the configuration of the plugin.
• Toggle Boxes: Replaced checkboxes in the Booking Calendar User Interface with toggle boxes. This change provides a clearer view of enabling specific options and features, particularly for enabling/disabling Rates and Availability in paid versions.

New Capacity Engine for time-slots

• With the new capacity engine, you can define booking capacities for your calendar, allowing you to receive a specific number of bookings per time slots or full dates. This enhances your control over bookings compared to the previous version, which only supported specific booking limits for full dates. (Available in Business Large, MultiUser versions).

• The the capacity feature ensures that the total number of bookings for specific dates or times does not exceed the specified capacity. This functionality is versatile and can be applied to various scenarios where you need to manage and limit bookings for specific resources to maintain efficient operations.
• Booking Quantity Control: Enabled the ability to enable and define a field for 'Booking Quantity Control,' allowing visitors to define the number of items they can book for specific dates or times within a single reservation. Find this option in New Capacity section on Booking > Settings General page. (Business Large, MultiUser)
• Capacity Shortcode: Added the Capacity shortcode for showing available (remained) slots per selected dates and times:

  [capacity_hint]

  . You can use it in the booking form at the Booking > Settings > Form page. (Business Large, MultiUser)

Redesigned Payment Buttons

• Redesigned Payment Buttons: Payment buttons in the new Booking Confirmation window have been redesigned for a more user-friendly experience. (Business Small/Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• Payment System Responses: Now, responses from payment systems after visitors' payments are recorded in the Note section of the booking, provided "Logging actions for booking" is activated at the Booking > Settings General page in the "Booking Admin Panel" section. Also the booking log now keeps track of booking details, such as cost calculations, actions related to payment request pages via email links, and other important events. (Business Small/Medium/Large, MultiUser)

• Additional Notes: Added the ability to add extended notes about "Total Cost | Discounts applied | Subtotal cost | Deposit Due | Balance Remaining" after creating the booking. Also, added notes about the approval of the booking by the payment system after a response from the Payment gateway. Notes are now added for bookings that were imported from Google Calendar. (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)

Showing Customizable Booking Details in Tooltip

• Booking Details Tooltip: Added the ability to show booking details in a mouse-over tooltip for specific booked dates or times during a day, significantly improving the speed of this functionality.
  This can now show booking details even for fully booked dates.
• It's a helpful feature for businesses with booking workflows that require displaying information about the users who've made the bookings or for similar neighborhood-based use cases.
  (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)

Set Unavailable Time Before or After Bookings

• This feature improves the engine for defining a specific period of unavailability before or after bookings. It now works in all scenarios, even for fully booked dates. When you select multiple dates and specific times for a booking, the system extends the unavailable time interval for those time slots on each day.

• It's a great feature for preparing your property or service before or after a specific booking, such as allowing time for cleaning.
  (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)

Simple HTML Configuration

• Now, you can organize your booking form fields in rows and columns using the new Simple HTML shortcodes. This makes configuring your booking form even easier.
• Here's how it works:
• Example of how to create a single row with 2 columns:

• <r>
    <c>...</c>
    <c>...</c>  
  </r>

• With this feature, you have the flexibility to design your booking form exactly as you need it.
• (Available in all paid versions).

• Create Rows: Use

  <r>...</r>

  tags to defines a row in your form.
• Add Columns: Inside each row, you can specify columns using

  <c>...</c>

  tags.
• Label Fields: Use the

  <l>...</l>

  tags.
• Spacer:

  <spacer></spacer>

  or

  <spacer>width:1em;</spacer>

  .

• Simplified field data tag:

  <f>...</f>

  . Easily highlight field data by enclosing it within

  <f>...</f>

  tags in the 'Content of booking fields data' section on the Booking > Settings > Form page. For example:

  <f>[secondname]</f

  . This will highlight the background of the field on the Booking Listing page. (All Pro Versions)

• Different Rates for options in select-boxes: Now, different rates are supported, depending on the selection of options in select-boxes. Example of rate configuration at Booking > Resources > Cost and rates > Rate page:

  [visitors=1:270;2:300;3:380;4:450]

  (9.8.0.5) (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• Date Selection Condition: Added a condition for defining a specific number of selected dates if started from a specific date. Condition format:

  '{select-day condition="date" for="2023-10-01" value="20,25,30-35"}'

  . Example of shortcode:

  [booking type=3 options='{select-day condition="date" for="2023-10-01" value="20,25,30-35"}']

  (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• Cancellation Date Hint Shortcode: Introduced the

  [cancel_date_hint]

  shortcode, which shows the date that is 14 days before the selected check-in date. (9.7.3.16) (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)

• • Toolbar Enhancement Added a 'Reset' button at Booking > Add booking page for the toolbar of configuring calendar size.
• • Date : Time section on the Booking > Settings General page, making it easier to configure date and time options. Now, the 'Time format' option is also available in the Booking Calendar Free version.
• • Daylight Saving Time Fix: Resolved the 'Daylight Saving Time' issue that existed on some servers (possibly due to themes or other plugins defining different timezones than those in WordPress via date_default_timezone_set(...) )), ensuring localized dates and times work correctly for all booking dates/times without the need to activate any options in the settings.
• • Improved Google Calendar Import: Improved the actual cron system for importing Google Calendar events, allowing you to set import time intervals starting from 15 minutes. The system now shows the last and next time of importing at the Booking > Settings > Sync > "Import Google Calendar Events" page.
• • Pseudo Cron System updated for google calendar imports.
• • Scrolling Enhancement: Enhanced scrolling to specific elements in the booking form, ensuring that the system will not create a new scroll if the previous one was not finished.
• • Legend Position: Moved 'Show legend below calendar' to the 'Calendar' section on the Booking > Settings General page. Previously, it was located in the 'Form' section.
• • Deprecated Options Removal: Removed deprecated options such as "Use localized time format", 'Time for showing "Thank you" message', 'Checking to prevent double booking during submitting booking,' 'Set capacity based on the number of visitors,' 'Disable booked time slots in multiple days selection mode' from Booking > Settings General page and option: "for setting maximum number of visitors per resource" at the Booking > Resources page in paid versions.
• • JS Calendar Scripts: Updated to version 9.8.0.3.
• • Caching Improvement: Introduced new caching for frequently used SQL requests (9.7.3.14).
• • 'Reply-To visitor email' Option: Added the 'Reply-To visitor email' option for "Admin emails" at the Booking > Settings > Emails page. By default, this option is disabled to prevent spam detection at some servers in the outbound SMTP relay, which could lead to email rejection (9.7.3.17).
• • Updated Styles: Improved the styles of warning messages in the booking form for a better user experience.

• • Calendar Dimensions: Increased the width of the calendar from 284px to 341px and the height of calendar cells from 40px to 48px (9.7.3.2). Improved internal logic for calendar months' size. The width of the calendar is now based on the maximum width, ensuring great responsiveness at any resolution. No need to use "strong_width" parameter in options of Booking Calendar shortcode. (9.7.3.4)
• • Mobile Optimization: For small mobile devices (width smaller than 400px), the height cell is now 40px by default (9.7.3.2). You can specify the same height for all devices using the 'strong_cell_height' parameter in the shortcode. For example: [booking type=1 nummonths=2 options='{calendar months_num_in_row=2 width=682px strong_cell_height=55px}'] (9.7.3.3)
• • Shortcodes Enhancement: All shortcodes can now use the parameter 'resource_id' instead of the previously deprecated 'type' parameter. (All Pro Versions)
• • Showing the full URL .ics feed at the Booking > Settings > Sync > "Export - .ics" page for easier copying of URLs (9.8.0.6). (All Pro Versions)
• • When creating new fast blank bookings, all fields are autofilled with '---' instead of 'admin' values, and the email address is filled with 'blank@wpbookingmanager.com,' which is skipped during sending emails by Booking Calendar. (Business Small/Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• • Improved 'Aggregate' Parameter: Now, when using 'aggregate,' if you mark specific dates as unavailable in aggregation resources on the Booking > Availability page, the system will automatically make those dates unavailable in the source resource. (All Pro Versions)
• • Enhanced Availability Management: If you mark dates as unavailable in the aggregate booking resources on the Booking > Availability page, the system treats these dates as unavailable for all booking resources, including parent and child resources. This ensures consistent availability management. (All Pro Versions. Capacity in Business Large, MultiUser)
• • For booking resources with specific capacities, when you use 'aggregate' for a 'parent booking resource' with a set capacity, the system adds bookings from 'aggregate booking resources' to the 'parent resource' and its child resources. Any 'unavailable dates' marked on the Booking > Availability page will affect both the parent and its child resources, making those times or dates unavailable for booking. (Business Large, MultiUser)

Under Hood Changes

• • Removed the JavaScript wpbc_settings variable. Instead of wpbc_settings.set_option( 'pending_days_selectable', true ); use: _wpbc.calendar__set_param_value( resource_id , 'pending_days_selectable' , true ); It's give ability to define this parameter separately per each calendar in paid versions.
• • Replaced deprecated functions related to the new "Capacity and Availability" engine (9.7.3.13), and updated the cron system for Google Calendar imports.
• • Replaced JavaScript function showErrorMessage( element , errorMessage , isScrollStop ) to wpbc_front_end__show_message__warning( jq_node, message ).
• • Test Dates Functions: Added the [wpbc_test_dates_functions] shortcode for testing different dates functions on the server, relative to the possible 'Daylight Saving Time' issue.
• CSS Class: Added a new 'wpbc_calendar' CSS class to the calendar HTML table, making it easier to manage CSS conflicts with theme styles). You can use CSS in the theme like this: table:not(.wpbc_calendar){...} instead of table{...} (9.7.3.7)
• • Stripe: Updated Stripe PHP library from version 9.0.0 to 12.6.0. (Business Small/Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• Max. visitors field at the Booking > Resources page is deprecated and removed. For defining capacity, use child booking resources. For defining max visitors selection, use a new custom booking form with a different number of users/visitors selection. (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)

Support

• • Support for WordPress 6.4: Added support for WordPress version 6.4.

Translations

• • Translation: Improved German (94% completed) by Reinhard Kappen and French (93% completed) by Roby.

Bug Fixes

• • Fixed an issue with not correctly showing creation and modification booking times on some servers.
• • Corrected the problem of showing the calendar with an incorrectly defined Start week date at Booking > Availability page.
• • Resolved the issue of not translating some terms in the plugin (9.7.3.9).
• • Fixed a color issue of daily cost in calendar date cells for the "Light-01" calendar skin (9.7.3.10).
• • Fixed an Uncaught TypeError related to the wpbc-gcal-class.php file (9.7.3.15).
• • Fixed an issue of redirection to the "Unknown-Stripe-Payment" page after Stripe payment in Booking Calendar MultiUser version, if the option "Receive all payments only to Super Booking Admin account" was activated. (9.7.3.5) (MultiUser)
• • Corrected the issue of not showing conditional time slots, which depend on Seasons. Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: # jQuery 10(9.7.3.6) (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• • Resolved the problem of removing duplicate days' selections at the "Specific days" selection option under range days selection mode using 2 mouse clicks. (Business Small/Medium/Large, MultiUser)
• • Fixed the issue of showing available dates in the search form, while such dates were defined as unavailable at Booking > Availability page (9.7.3.11). (Business Large, MultiUser)
• • Eliminated the issue when used conditional days selection logic, and some weekdays were not defined in seasons. In this case, the system will use the default days selection settings. (Business Medium/Large, MultiUser)