A booking type is one bookable service. It decides how long an appointment lasts, how often a start time is offered, how many people fit in one slot, who can take it, and how far ahead visitors may book.
Create one
- Go to HappenBoard → Bookings → Booking types.
- Click Add booking type. The Bookings screen offers the same shortcut, labelled New booking type.
- Fill in Name. This is the only required field, and it becomes the heading on the booking page and the subject line of the confirmation email.
- Work through the Scheduling, Hosts and Location panels below.
- Click Create booking type.
Creating publishes the booking type straight away. That matters: only a published booking type serves times. A draft or a trashed one returns nothing to the booking page.
Scheduling
- Duration (min): how long the appointment lasts. Default 30, minimum 5.
- Slot step (min): how often a start time is offered. Default 30, minimum 5.
- Capacity (1 = one-to-one): seats per slot. Default 1. Above 1, several people can book the same time.
- Buffer before (min) and Buffer after (min): padding around each booking. Default 0.
- Min notice (min): how far in the future the first bookable slot sits. Default 60, so nothing within the next hour.
- Max advance (days): how far ahead visitors may book. Default 60, minimum 1.
- Duration unit: Minutes, Hours or Days. It changes the unit the duration field is read in, so a two-day workshop does not have to be entered as 2880 minutes.
- Price: the amount shown to visitors, in the currency set under Settings → General. Covered below.
- Requires approval: off by default. On, a booking arrives as a request rather than a confirmation, and waits for you to approve or decline it on the Bookings screen. The slot is held in the meantime, so nobody else can take it while you decide.
- Cancel cutoff (min): how close to the start a customer may still cancel their own booking. Past that point the self-service link stops working and they have to ask you.
Duration versus slot step
These two are easy to confuse. Duration is how long the meeting takes. Slot step is how often a start time appears. A 60 minute duration with a 30 minute step offers 09:00, 09:30, 10:00 and so on, and each booking still runs a full hour. Set the step equal to the duration for back to back appointments with no overlap in the offered list.
Buffers and notice
Buffers are checked against existing bookings, not shown to the visitor. A 15 minute buffer after a 30 minute appointment means the following 15 minutes are treated as busy, so nobody can book on top of your travel or reset time.
Min notice protects you from a booking five minutes from now. Max advance stops the calendar running away into next year. Note that the booking page requests the next 62 days, so raising Max advance far above that will not add more dates to the page.
Group bookings
Set Capacity above 1 and the same slot stays on offer until the seats run out. The list screen labels it Group with the seat count. The booking page books one seat per submission, so a group of four means four people booking the same time separately, not one person reserving four places. If you need one person to claim several places, use event capacity and an RSVP form instead.
Hosts and assignment
Open the Hosts & assignment panel. The Hosts field suggests every user on your site who can edit posts, which in a default WordPress install means authors, editors and administrators (see roles and permissions). Add at least one: a booking type with no host produces no times at all, no matter what hours are set.
Assignment decides who takes the booking when more than one host is free:
- Round-robin (the default) gives it to the free host with the fewest upcoming bookings, which spreads the load across an interchangeable team.
- Fixed honours a host chosen by the customer. The booking page does not show a host chooser, so in practice this hands the slot to the first eligible host who is free at that time.
Every host you add needs their own weekly hours, which are set separately on the Availability screen.
Location and colour
The Location panel holds two more fields. Location mode records how the appointment happens: In person, Virtual, Phone or Custom. Accent color stores a colour against the booking type. Both are saved with the booking type, and neither changes what the visitor sees on the booking page, so treat them as notes for yourself.
Paid appointments
The free plugin does have a Price field, in the Scheduling panel. Fill it in and the amount is shown to visitors on the booking page, in the currency you set under Settings → General. Leave it at 0 and no price is shown at all.
What the free plugin does not do is take the money. There is no payment step in the booking flow: the visitor picks a time, leaves a name and an email, and the booking is confirmed straight away. You collect the amount yourself, on the day or by invoice, exactly as you would for a price written on a page.
Charging online, so that the slot is only held once the customer has paid, is a Pro feature.
Editing later
Click a booking type’s name in the list to reopen the editor. Changing the duration or the rules changes what is offered from that moment on. Bookings already recorded keep the times they were made with, and the page carrying the booking page block picks up the new settings on its next load.