GlowBook

Premium standalone booking system for beauty salons, hair braiders, and service businesses. GlowBook helps salons manage services, add-ons, availability, customer profiles, deposits/retainers, Square payments, confirmations, and customer self-service from one polished WordPress plugin.

Highlights

• Standalone booking flow with mobile-first service, add-on, date/time, details, Square checkout, and confirmation screens.
• Square payments for booking-time payments, retainers, saved-card support, receipts, and customer balance payments.
• Configurable customer payments for returning-customer and new-customer amounts, with optional automatic enforcement.
• Daily booking limits with global default, weekday-specific limits, and specific-date overrides.
• Backend add-on filtering so services only show valid add-ons without extra frontend hiding logic.
• Customer portal for viewing appointments, paying balances, rescheduling/cancelling when policy allows, and opening magic-link access.
• Admin customer directory with customer profiles, booking history, payment summaries, and WordPress-user linking context.
• Import/export tools for full backups and entity-level migration across services, add-ons, categories, customers, staff, availability, and bookings.
• Booking-only admin roles for staff/admin users who should only access GlowBook booking tools.
• Responsive admin and frontend UI designed to feel clean on desktop and phone.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or higher
• PHP 7.4 or higher
• Square account for standalone card payments
• WooCommerce is optional for compatibility/integration, but GlowBook can run as a standalone booking system

Installation

1. Upload the glowbook folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate GlowBook from WordPress Admin -> Plugins.
3. Go to Bookings -> Settings and configure business, payment, notification, and portal settings.
4. Go to Bookings -> Availability and configure weekly schedule, daily limits, blocked dates, and date overrides.
5. Add services, categories, and add-ons from the GlowBook admin menu.

Booking Pages

GlowBook supports the standalone booking URL, usually:

/book/

You can also embed the booking flow with:

[sodek_gb_booking_form]

or for a specific service:

[gb_booking_form service_id="123"]

Customer Portal

The customer portal is usually available at:

/my-appointments/

Customers can access the portal with their booking email and a magic link. After a successful booking, GlowBook can generate a short-lived portal access link so customers can view their appointment without re-entering their email immediately.

Payment Rules

GlowBook supports configurable booking-time payments:

• Returning customer payment amount, default $50.
• New customer payment amount, default $150.
• Optional enforcement based on customer history/email/phone.
• Manual mode where customers can choose the applicable option and staff verify later.
• 50% and full-payment options for customers who want to reduce or clear their balance.

Availability And Limits

Availability includes:

• Weekly schedule.
• Minimum booking notice.
• Maximum advance booking window.
• Blocked dates.
• Global daily booking limit.
• Weekday-specific daily limits.
• Specific-date overrides for holidays, extensions, or special operating days.
• Add-on-aware duration checks for the main booking flow.

Admin Tools

• Dashboard and calendar.
• Booking list and booking details.
• Services, categories, and add-ons.
• Customer directory and customer profile pages.
• Reports and analytics.
• Import/export and full backup tools.
• Staff and booking-only admin roles.
• Manual balance reconciliation for payments received in salon.

Notifications

GlowBook includes booking confirmation, cancellation, reschedule, reminder, and admin notification support. Email delivery depends on the WordPress mail environment, so production sites should use a reliable SMTP/mail provider.

Version 2.3.20

This release improves payment-rule flexibility and booking-entry reliability:

• Added a per-service override so consultations and special-case services can bypass returning/new customer payment rules and use their normal deposit settings.
• Improved booking-policy popup reliability, including better support for media-library-backed popup images.
• Fixed service export data so frontend visibility and staff-selection settings are preserved across import/export.

Version 2.3.19

This release finishes the latest production hardening and booking-entry polish:

• Hardened Square payment retry safety for standalone booking checkout and portal balance payments.
• Added a configurable booking-policy acceptance popup shown before customers can begin booking.
• Improved standalone production polish around payment safety, popup flow, and release cleanup.

Version 2.3.18

This release tightens the standalone production path:

• Hardened overlap locks so in-progress checkouts block overlapping times across services.
• Fixed timezone-sensitive booking and portal reschedule time calculations.
• Made staff availability add-on aware across AJAX and REST paths.
• Removed missing standalone asset enqueues and disabled the retired legacy standalone booking endpoint.
• Cleaned standalone page rendering for block themes and disabled public debug output in site config.

Version 2.3.17

This release packages the production-ready standalone booking flow work:

• Hardened Square checkout and booking-time payment handling.
• Configurable returning/new customer payment amounts.
• Daily booking limits with weekday and date overrides.
• Add-on-aware frontend availability and checkout duration.
• Improved confirmation, customer portal, admin customer pages, reports, import/export, and mobile UI polish.
• Booking-only admin role support for staff/admin access.

Known Follow-Up Cleanup

These items are known and planned for a later cleanup pass:

• Remove or hard-disable the legacy sodek_gb_standalone_booking AJAX endpoint.
• Remove or guard missing optional frontend asset enqueues for old staff/phone-verification scripts.
• Release temporary slot locks when transaction creation fails.
• Make portal reschedule validation fully add-on-duration aware.

Development

Install development dependencies with Composer:

composer install

Useful scripts:

composer test
composer phpstan
composer phpcs

License

This project is licensed under GPL v2 or later.

Credits

Built by Shadrach Odekhiran.