Hello,
Thanks for your message. There is definitely no specific requirement in terms of Theme or techniques to be used in order to build your website with VikBooking. Our suggestion is to test the free version of the plugin on your WordPress website by using the Theme you like.
The goal is to prepare the wp-admin section of VikBooking by creating at least one rate plan and one room-type, and by defining the rates for the various number of nights of stay.
At that point, you can take care of the public section of your website, and the only requirement to properly set up the booking process with VikBooking is to create a few Shortcodes of specific types and assign them to specific pages of your website, no matter if they are built through the WordPress native functions or through your preferred page-builder plugin. More precisely, you will need at least two types of Shortcode to be properly configured, hence assigned to a respective page/post of your website: one of type “Search Form” and another of type “Booking Details”.
Thanks to these Shortcodes, the URL routing functions will work correctly, so that for example the booking process will be started from a URL like “/book-now”, while the front-end booking details page for guests can be routed with a URL similar to “/your-booking”.
Another important aspect of the set up is to not use Shortcodes in your home page, because that’s a special page with no “permalink”, it’s actually your root domain address. Therefore, Shortcodes should be used on any page/post except your home page, where you should rather use the Widgets installed in VikBooking, such as the “Search Form” widget like in our official demo website. Please notice that by default Widgets can only be published onto a Sidebar of your Theme, and so if you are willing to publish a specific widget on a specific section of a page/post, then you should use a page-builder plugin that allows to do that.
As stated above, we suggest testing the free version of VikBooking on any existing WordPress website, and after completing the basic set up of rooms and rates, you can work on the Shortcodes section (there’s an apposite button in the page Dashboard of VikBooking, and the wizard will guide you through this process). Once you create a Shortcode in VikBooking, you can use the apposite button to add it to a page of your WordPress website, which can then be modified by using your custom plugin or page-builder.
We hope this is helpful!
The VikWP Team
