Hello Leon,
We are glad to hear Vik Booking is working great for you!
Many of our clients are using Vik Booking for Camping Sites rather than Hotel Rooms. In fact, our complementary Vik Channel Manager plugin is also compatible with channels like Pitchup.com, Campsites.co.uk etc.. for which our Channel Manager service called “e4jConnect” is listed as a Software Partner.
However, some extra configuration in your case may be required, for example to change any language definition mentioning “room” or “rooms” to something like “Camp site”, “Pitch”, “Tent” or anything you want.
In these cases we suggest overriding the default Gettext definitions in Vik Booking through any plugins available for WordPress.
In the Knowledge Base section of our website, we suggest to use the free plugin called “Gettext override translations” (https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/gettext-override-translations/). You can look for this plugin directly from your website to install it and to activate it. This plugin will provide a simple interface to set up a language definition to override, and its corresponding override value. Please notice that this plugin will require the exact English string to override in Vik Booking (case-sensitive) or the “replacement” will not actually work.
For example, if you would like to change any occurrence of “Room” into “Camp Site”, then you should use “Room” as default string, and “Camp Site” as the override value. You should do the same for “Rooms” (plural) or any other wording you would like to override. We also suggest using a software like PoEdit to quickly identify (by using the apposite search tool) all strings containing “room” so that you can copy the exact original language string and provide an override translation for it.
This is the best solution as no future updates will ever touch your work.
Regarding the “Booking Approval Function”: this is indeed available, but only with the Pro version, which allows to set up different payment methods. More precisely, the Pro version will set up a payment method called “Bank Transfer”, which is not actually connected to any bank gateway. This payment method can be just renamed to anything like “Request Approval”, and it will let you decide the status to apply to all bookings. If you leave it to “Pending”, the administrators will be notified via email for all new bookings, and they will be able to manually confirm them via back-end.
Regarding the country for the phone input fields: those are currently read from the installed languages on your website, and they are sorted alphabetically by using their 2-char country code. This means that by installing the South African English translation for WordPress on your website (en_ZA), the country flag for South Africa will be displayed in the top list, which includes the so called “preferred countries”.
In the very next update for Vik Booking, Free and Pro versions, we are going to include a new configuration setting to allow the administrators to change the default ordering and content of the so called “Preferred Countries” used to display a list of most-used countries in the drop down to choose the country for each phone input field.
We invite you to get in touch with our technical support team through our website in case you have any other technical questions. Thank you!
Best Regards,
The VikWP Team
