It supports both digital and physical (onsite) bookings and offers a number of useful options such as the ability to accept payments for bookings, calendar synchronisation, reminders, etc.
In our hands-on test of Brindle Booking, we’ll take a look at this plugin and show you how it works.
Overall, I enjoyed my experience and thought the default user interface was well designed, which should create a great experience for your site visitors.
Let’s go!
Streamed view: Quick overview of functions
I’ll show you all the features in the practical section, but here’s a brief overview of what Brindle Booking offers:
- Unlimited services by appointment that can be categorized.
- Convenient appointment system.
- Integrated Stripe payment integration for paid services.
- Add a physical location (for a site).
- Allow visitors to choose between online and in-person booking services.
- Manage multiple employees, each with their own schedule.
- Integration with Google Calendar.
- Email notifications and reminders.
Other small but useful features are
- GDPR support, which means users must accept your terms and conditions to book their appointment.
- Support for translations via .po files (easy to translate with Loco Translate or multilingual plugins).
Overall, Brindle Booking is pretty flexible and you can use it for this:
- Services
- Meetings
- Pick up at the store.
BrindleReservation Product Roadmap
Brindle Booking also has a public roadmap that includes many exciting features in future releases, including:
- Reservation time
- Jobs for multiple time windows
- Bundled orders
- Support for multiple sites
- Possibility to refer employees to specific services
- Possibility to configure e-mail
- Other payment gateways
- Add custom fields to the booking form
You can check out the full product roadmap to see what’s coming up.
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What is Brindle Booking for your visitors
I will start by showing you and your visitors how you will experience Brindle’s turnkey booking system. Then, in the next section, I’ll show you the options to configure it.
In the foreground, Brindle Reservations operates entirely in a pop-up. You can use a shortcut to add a popup trigger anywhere on your site. You can also use a CSS class to start a popup window that allows you to use a custom button (or one you created with a page builder like Elementor or Divi).
On the first page of the pop-up window, the visitor can select his employee, the service category and a specific service (from the list of all services in that category). They can also choose how they want to make the appointment – for example, in person or online – and what day they want to make the appointment:
On the next page, they can choose from the available time slots for that employee, based on the employee’s schedule for that day:
Visitors can then enter their booking details and choose their payment method. They will also receive a nice box with a summary of their appointment:
Once they confirm their appointment, they get a nice confirmation screen and the option to print the confirmation, share it on social media or set a reminder in Google Calendar. You will also receive a confirmation email (you cannot currently configure the email, but this feature is planned):
You (and your staff) can then view upcoming meetings in your WordPress dashboard. Employees will also receive an email confirmation of their new assignments:
When you modify an appointment, you can change all of its details so that you can make changes manually if necessary (for example, if a client needs to change a reservation):
Now let’s see how you can organize Brindle bookings in your garden.
Set brindle reservation
Once you install and activate the plugin, a new My Brindle section will appear in your WordPress dashboard where you can customize everything.
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The settings are divided into four tabs:
- Services
- Design
- Parameters
- Program
Adjustment services
To add services, you must first add one or more categories to organize your services (if you offer multiple services – otherwise you can just ignore the categories). You can then click the button to add the new reserved service to one of the categories:
When you add a new service, a pop-up window opens where you can specify the service name, category, and price:
You can repeat the process to add as many services as you want.
The only thing you can’t do is set a fixed time limit for each service. On the other hand, you can only define a total duration for all employee services. I think this would be useful for some applications. For example, if I… For example, if I offer one-hour and two-hour workouts, it would be nice to have a built-in feature for that.
If, on the other hand, you only offer meetings in fixed blocks of time, you are prepared to tread water.
Building control
The Design tab gives you some basic options for managing the colors of the booking form, so you can customize it to fit your website:
Parameter setting
The Settings tab gives you access to many useful features, including:
- Configuration of payment details and integration of ties.
- Add a physical location for a reservation.
- Choice of methods for making appointments (e.g., in-store, online or by phone).
- Selection of customer information.
- Set the confirmation page.
- Google Calendar integration.
At the top you can set the payment methods and other information:
Then you can customize your physical location (if applicable), as well as many other options for what appears at the end of the booking form. For example, appointment methods, customer data to be collected, GDPR recognition, etc.
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Underneath that you also have the option to add the Google Calendar data:
Note that you can only arrange appointment methods for your booking system as a whole – you can’t arrange them by department, which can be useful to have some flexibility.
Addition diagrams
Finally, the Schedule tab allows you to configure the schedules for all your services.
You can either create a global table that applies to everyone. You can also create separate schedules for each employee.
But first, a brief word about the staff. Brindle Booking relies on the normal WordPress custom system to add and manage employees. You can add new employees by going to Users → Add New. Brindle Booking adds its own special user role, Employee, so that only users with this role appear in your booking system (this is useful if you want to allow non-employees to register as well) :
To add a roster, select the desired time slots and employee in the roster.
The schedule governs the duration of standard assignments for all departments for this employee. For example, if you set it to one hour, visitors can book that employee’s time in one-hour increments.
You can then lock this employee’s schedule for the steps you select in the scheduling table. You can also choose whether or not to display this employee on the front panel:
You can repeat the same process to add different schedules for different employees.
And that’s it for Brindle Bookings. Overall, this is a fairly lightweight solution that is very easy to set up.
Brindle booking price
Brindle Booking is only available in a premium version, but is quite affordable, especially compared to other WordPress booking plugins.
There are two license options, each including all features plus one year of support and updates:
- One page – 39
- Unlimited seats – 89
You can also try it out for free for 14 days, which is pretty unique for WordPress plugins.
BrindleArmor Final Ideas
Overall, I think Brindle Booking is a solid, lightweight option with a very nice user interface. I love the popup approach and think it’s one of the best booking plugins I’ve tried.
It doesn’t have as much granular control as other booking plugins (especially at the service level), but that also makes it much easier and clearer. Besides, many people don’t need such a precise check.
Since it is not possible to set specific time limits for individual services, I think Brindle Booking is better suited for situations where you only offer a few services or all your services have the same duration. You can set different time limits for different employees, but not at the department level.
For example, if you only offer one-hour training sessions, Brindle Booking is a very simple option that can cover your usage situation.
The developer also has many useful features planned in the product roadmap, so you’ll have even more granular control soon.
If you are interested, I encourage you to try it and see for yourself. Brindle Booking offers a 14 day free trial so you don’t take any chances.
Receive reservations for Brindle
frequently asked questions
How do I add a publication in WordPress?
To get started, create a new post or page in WordPress, then click the Add WPForms icon. Next, select a customer booking form from the WPForms widget drop-down menu. Then click the blue Publish button in the top right corner to publish your post or page, and your customer booking form will appear on your website.
How to use WordPress for simple tasks
How do I add a booking calendar to my website?
Answer to the calendar
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