Workflow and Statuses

Hi Support,

Easy Appointments v3.12.14

I am a little disappointed with the documentation because to find out some things I was forced to go through the documentation, the entire forum here and on your website, all the questions from beginning to end. For some questions, I did not find any answer, there are no instructions, there is nothing. I even studied other similar plugins to understand how this should work. I looked at pictures on the search engine, YouTube videos, everything I could find. The plugin is developing but this is not reflected in the documentation.

The answer from support (via plugin) was to play around a bit with the email notifications and that I would thus understand how everything works.

I searched for websites using this plugin on: https://themesinfo.com/wordpress-plugins/. On over 90% of the websites that use this plugin, the plugin is non-functional. Webmasters were not successful in the settings because they didn’t have instructions. Why they still have the plugin activated is unknown to me. Some of them that have good settings have very simple requirements, one service, one location, and one worker and that’s all. But they all make mistakes in email messages. How did I find that out? Unfortunately, I had to “spam reservations” to get email messages and see how others do it. The rest is visible from the reservation form. You cannot click on any date. The plugin is not set up well. A small mistake and the plugin cannot receive reservations.

When I use a plugin, I want to get to know it in detail. For some plugins, no special instructions are even needed because they are often intuitive. Easy Appointments is an excellent plugin but it is not intuitive. For it, it is necessary to have instructions and to work according to instructions.

Documentation

The documentation and available information are not written for a beginner (and a beginner is anyone who installs and activates this plugin for the first time). It is written more in the style of a reminder for long-term users with experience using this plugin. Or for developers. Old screenshots from the old version of the plugin are still being used. The documentation is not detailed. A lot is missing.

Email notification

The workflow is missing here. When is which message sent? There are no default templates for messages (except for the admin). What does the status “confirmed” and the content of the message “confirmed” mean for a new user? It doesn’t mean anything at all. There’s nothing about that anywhere. The plugin will function that way too, but it is not professional. A new user does not know the Workflow because there is no detailed information and instructions for it. A new user does not know how to organize email messages, that is, they don’t know what to write in them and what the message should look like. There is only a default admin template. Insufficient for the normal functioning of the plugin.

Link Confirm or URL Confirm

The plugin has an incorrect workflow. Why? There is no double opt-in and opt-out here (for email). It should be so that when a visitor/client receives a message for “Pending”, they confirm their email address by clicking on a link. And only after that does the entire procedure continue. If they have not confirmed the email address, the procedure does not continue. It is wrong to offer them “#link_confirm#”. What if it’s a spam message? In that case, unnecessary messages are sent to the visitor, worker, and admin. So that in the end the administrator cancels the reservation. Then we again have a series of messages to everyone participating in that process (visitor, worker, admin). It is especially a problem when the worker first receives an email for “Confirmed” and then “Cancelled”. A worker is here to work. Checking and arranging work is the task of the Admin.

When the visitor has confirmed their email address, the status should be “Reservation”. Then the Admin manually approves or declines this reservation. Only after that do all participants (Visitor and Worker) receive a message for the status “Confirmed”.

Or even better, the sequence should be: Reservation (this is a kind of hidden status anyway), Pending, Cancelled, Confirmed.

But, what if the link “#link_confirm#” is not put in the “Pending” message? Where to put it? Nowhere! Unfortunately, the plugin has an incorrect Workflow. I hope this will be corrected in one of the following updates.

Thanks in advance. Regards