Smart Booking

Description

Smart Booking is a completely free WordPress booking plugin built specifically for consultation-style appointments tied to a person (a staff member). It is designed for use cases such as lawyers, certified professionals, marriage agencies, chiropractic clinics, and tutoring schools.

Key Features

• Completely free, no limits — There is no Pro version, no paid add-ons, and no license activation. Every feature is free.
• Ready in 5 minutes — Activating the plugin auto-creates a default store, staff member, and the three core fields (name, email, phone). Just paste the [smart_booking] shortcode into a post or page to display the booking form.
• Optimized for the Japanese booking flow — A 3-step flow (input → confirmation → done”) that lets the customer review their entries on a dedicated confirmation screen before finalizing the booking.
• Multi-store / multi-staff management — Manage schedules per store and per staff member. Whether the store-select and staff-select steps are shown to customers is automatically decided by how many active records exist (skipped when there is only one).
• Flexible schedule configuration — Time slots in 30 / 60 / 90 / 120-minute units, capacity per slot, weekday-pattern bulk copy, and an option to overwrite existing schedules.
• Calendar display modes — Choose between day view (horizontal scroll), month view (calendar grid), or a toggle between both, configurable from the admin screen.
• Custom fields — In addition to the three built-in fields (name, email, phone), administrators can add text, email, phone, textarea, select, radio, and checkbox fields.
• Email notifications — Automatic emails are sent to the customer and the administrator when a booking is received, and a confirmation email is sent to the customer on approval. All templates are editable from the admin screen.
• Design customization — Button color, date-selection color, time-slot color, required-mark color, and focus color are all configurable from the admin screen.
• Concurrent booking protection — Capacity is enforced through a single atomic SQL UPDATE, preventing double-bookings when multiple users submit at the same moment.
• Google Tag Manager (GTM) integration — Each booking step (store_select, staff_select, date_select, time_select, form_input, confirm, complete) is automatically pushed to window.dataLayer, so you can wire up GA4 funnels and Google Ads conversion tags through GTM without writing any code. The GTM container tag itself must be installed separately on your site.
• WordPress.org guideline compliant — No external CDN scripts/styles, no PHP sessions, all queries use $wpdb->prepare(), all output is escaped, and every REST endpoint enforces nonce + current_user_can('manage_options').

Supported booking flow

[Store Select] → [Staff Select] → [Date Select] → [Time Select] → [Form Input] → [Confirmation] → [Done]

The store-select and staff-select steps are shown only when more than one active store / staff record exists. With a single store and a single staff member, the customer starts directly from date selection.

Optional integrations (off by default)

The following external integrations are off by default. They only initiate any outbound traffic after an administrator explicitly enables them on the Integrations” tab and provides the required credentials (API key, etc.).

• Google Calendar integration — Creates a calendar event when a booking is received and deletes it on cancellation.
• ChatWork notifications — Posts a notification message to a designated ChatWork room when a booking is received.

See the External services” section below for full details.

Customization & feature requests

For feature requests and customization inquiries, please contact the developer, Liberdade Inc., or visit our service site at wp-smart-booking.com.

Source code

The complete source code, including the un-minified JavaScript and CSS sources under src/, is publicly available on GitHub:

https://github.com/KeisukeYokoyama/SmartBooking

External services

This plugin may communicate with the following external services. Both are off by default, and outbound traffic only occurs after an administrator explicitly enables the integration on the Settings > Integrations” tab and provides the required credentials.

Google Calendar API

• Endpoint: https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/
• Purpose: Creates a Google Calendar event when a booking is received, and deletes the event when the booking is cancelled.
• Data sent: Booking date and time, customer name, store name, staff name, booking number.
• Timing: When a booking is received (event creation) / when a booking is cancelled (event deletion).
• Authentication: Service account JSON key (uploaded by the administrator on the settings screen).
• Default: Off
• Terms of service: Google APIs Terms of Service
• Privacy policy: Google Privacy Policy

ChatWork API

• Endpoint: https://api.chatwork.com/v2/
• Purpose: Posts a notification message to a designated ChatWork room when a booking is received.
• Data sent: Customer name, booking date and time, store name, staff name, booking number.
• Timing: Immediately after a customer submits the booking form.
• Authentication: API token (entered by the administrator on the settings screen).
• Default: Off
• Terms of service: ChatWork Terms of Service
• Privacy policy: ChatWork Privacy Policy

If neither integration is enabled, Smart Booking does not make any outbound requests to external services.