After the plugin, has been successfully installed and activated, you should see a new option in your WordPress dashboard’s main navigation menu.

From there, you can access the plugin’s settings. Upon clicking the menu, you will be taken to Redi Reservation’s Page where you can access different tabs. The Home page will be the Reservation list, from where you can see all pending, approved, rejected and upcoming reservations. We’ll cover this later in the guide.

To access the plugin’s settings, you can either click on the Settings or Settings $. You might be wondering about their difference. The Settings allows you to access the Free Package Settings, which includes the common settings, front-end settings, custom fields, restaurant settings, working time and email configuration, this is enough to accept reservations from your website. The Settings $ allows you to access the Basic Package Settings which will allow you to configure advanced settings such as seats by weekday, open times, blocked times, email templates and reply comments.

There’s also the Test reservation option in the Redi Reservations menu, which will allow you to preview and test the plugin itself. It’s useful for troubleshooting issues and tweaking your installation.

Finally, the Upcoming (Tablet PC) will allow you to see all of the upcoming reservations.

Now that you’ve got a basic understanding of Redi Reservation plugin, let’s go through each of the settings to help you understand how to use the plugin effectively.

You also can see the same features explained in video form:

Free Package Settings

Data Input Appearance

This block of settings controls how reservation form is presented on the screen

Common Settings

Common settings allow you to configure the basic features of your reservation form. You can set the following values:

30 min time step

60 min time step

Error message when the user tries to reserve for a date which is not within the scope

Front End Settings

Message for large groups – is the message that will be shown if the user chooses a large number of people on the reservation page. When the user chooses more than the maximum number of people allowed, this message will appear.

Upon choosing “the more than X people”, the message appears.

Hide steps – When this is set to true, after the user selects a timeslot, the step 1 details will be automatically hidden.

Step 2, Step 1 is hidden because the hide steps option is set to true.

Calendar type – there are two options here that allow you to change how the calendar is displayed. The screenshot below shows the difference between the two types.

Always show

Show on click

Time picker type – there are two options here that allow you to change how the selections are displayed in the reservation form. The screenshots below show the difference between the two types.

jQuery

Dropdown

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Hidden Front End Settings

There are some settings that are not possible yet to change from the settings page but are possible to define in the configuration file

Seating duration - if defined, then guests can select seating duration from provided options

file: customduration.json

{
    "durations": [
        {
          "duration": "90",
          "name": "eat & go 1.5h"
        },
        {
          "duration": "150",
          "name": "relaxed eating 2.5h"
        },
        {
          "duration": "300",
          "name": "sit in with friends 5h"
        }
    ]
}

Custom fields

Custom fields allow you to set additional items in step 2 of your reservation form.

The name field should describe what your custom field is for.

You can choose from either a textbox or a checkbox and whether it is required or not. When the “Is required?” option is checked, the user must fill up that particular field in order to submit the form.

If you purchase add-ons, you can get additional features such as the following:

The required error message will appear if the user did not fill up a required field upon submitting the form.

Below shows the additional custom field and the error message associated with it when the user attempts to submit the form without filling up the required custom field.

Take note that the additional custom field will appear as a comment in the email as shown the image below. The other comment submitted using the default comments text box will appear last, after all of the custom fields have been listed.

Restaurant Settings

The restaurant settings allow you to put in information about your restaurant such as the restaurant name, address and more.

Working Time

This is where you can specify your restaurant’s open hours in 24-hour format. So 2 PM should be written as 14:00, 3:00 PM as 15:00 and so on. If your restaurant is closed on a certain day, leave it blank. If you have more complex working time, please use Basic Package settings options. If restaurants close after midnight, then set closing time to 02:00 for same day.

Email Configuration

Here, you can set the language and date format for in-house emails.

Date format

In this section, you can specify what type of date format you want to use. Below is an example of the Slash “dd/mm/yyyy” format.

Different date format choices.

How "dd/mm/yyyy" appears on the front-end.

API Key

Please provide this key to identify your account for troubleshooting.