calendarista-basic-edition

As an accessible business, we need to test plug-ins beyond what is immediately visible. After only a couple of hours, we knew this wouldn’t adapt to our users needs. WE WERE REFUSED A REFUND – the first plug-in company to do so to us. They are impersonal (no names used in correspondence, un-caring, and – as far as I can tell greedy with no care for end users. We’ve settled on Simply Schedule Appointments, and Nathan there was able to immediately amend a feature to make it more usable to end users. Amelia also returned our payment with a lovely message wishing us well – and hoping we’ll return one day.

After a lot of research I bought this plug in via Envato (I’ve reviewed it here because the reviews already sell it over there but they suck here) It is a great plugin for booking sites! I have to admit at first I was a little overwhelmed with all the settings but after I explored them all and understood how the plugin worked and what it was aiming to achieve I found it very satisfying to use and everything is there for a reason. Everything I needed has been included and then some.The best part of all is the support! I’ve emailed Typps several times and the reply always came back super fast! Well done on a great plug in.

This plugin tries to do everything under the sun for a booking system but fails at everything the million different settings are a nightmare to work through with very bad and vague documentation lost a lot of business because of this plugin and it is also vulnerable to hacks. DO NOT USE

Read the write ups, looked at the price, $59, thought worth a try. So that was Sunday, went to buy it Tuesday, oh it’s $69 now! And obviously doesn’t include tax and handling fee… $85! I went ahead anyway as the Calendarista website makes it clear this is pretty straightforward. Huh! Yeah right. I don’t mind a challenge, been a dev for over 20 years, but where is there any troubleshooting threads online? Nowhere, where is this apps online troubleshooting? Nowhere. You have to do the email route, and just hang about until you find something else you’re not sure about… not good enough! They should have a troubleshoot/faq, whatever and it’s really winding me up now. Not happy with this product at all. Oh and the instruction pdf is shabby at best (I’m being nice). They say go here, go there, you look at tabs and menu’s and those things are absolutely NOT there. I’d call this the Ikea of web app instructions. I think the previous reviews have been far to generous on their star ratings. An idea of my outright annoyance, I registered with www.ads-software.com today just to write this review. THUMBS DOWN!!

The back end of this plugin is all over the place… not intuitive to set up at all. Once you learn how to use it, it is alright. I have to override a lot of things with CSS because despite how many options there are on the back end it lacks some very basic functionality. For example it has preset color skins… obviously in 2020 most companies want to use custom colors to match their brand so that is useless. I asked their support for the CSS classes to update the button colors to make things faster and they said “it’s not possible, it’s too complicated and you need to select from the preset colors”. Well obviously that is not true…it’s just a lazy or uneducated reply. I was able to change them after 5min or so of trial and error with the Chrome inspection tool. Surprisingly disappointing customer support. Had I not already invested the $69 and so much time on behalf of my client I would have kept looking for a more modern option. It gets the job done but it’s not especially aesthetically pleasing or easy to use. For this price I expect an actual premium plugin.

So I’ve got the paid version from CODECANYON.com and I really enjoy it. It handles everything nicely. The only complain I would have is that the documentation is not quite complete. Nothing is in there about the CONFIRMATION BOOKING URL. Which isn’t a game changer… but it’s something I personally need pretty badly.