Early on in 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we integrated FooEvents with Zoom as a way for you to sell access to virtual events directly from your WordPress website. Our Zoom integration experienced massive uptake and has become a vital part of our offering. We also launched the FooEvents Bookings extension, which makes it possible for your attendees to purchase access to predefined date and time slots. This has also been well received and has become one of our most popular extensions. This year, we’re bringing the two together and making it possible to sell access to bookable Zoom meetings!
The latest FooEvents Bookings update (1.12.16) includes the ability to automatically generate Zoom meetings when attendees book slots for specific dates and times. This makes it easier than ever before to sell access to virtual consulting services such as therapy sessions, doctors appointments, coaching sessions, or group Zoom meetings such as online workshops, virtual yoga classes, virtual art classes, online courses etc. What makes this integration particularly exciting, is that it takes away the pain of managing bookings and does it all for you! Attendees and hosts are automatically registered as participants for the Zoom meeting. The attendee will receive an email ticket that includes all the meeting details including the option to add the meeting directly to their calendar, while the host can stay on top of their schedule using the FooEvents Check-ins apps.
If you already use FooEvents for virtual meetings, you will be happy to learn that we’ve also added an option to auto-generate meetings for single-day and multi-day events. No more back and forth between FooEvents and Zoom. Simply set your event date and time when creating the event and we take care of the rest. Of course, you can still manually link events to specific meetings and webinars if required. To find out more about bookable Zoom meetings, please read through the Bookable Events section in the Zoom Meetings and Webinars help doc and this Use Case Tutorial.
Other notable features included in the latest FooEvents plugin updates:
- Bookings selection order: You can now change the order of the date and slot drop-down fields on both the product and checkout pages. Previously, your attendees would first need to select the slot before selecting the date. This was largely due to the way that the slots are managed and structured, however, we received feedback from numerous customers that the ability to first select the date and then select the slot was required for their workflow. To enable this option, edit the event, then go to the Product Data tabs, select Events Settings and scroll down to the bottom and enable the Bookings selection order option.
- Booking links in FooEvents Calendar: When clicking on a booking link using the FooEvents Calendar, the appropriate date and slot are carried through from the calendar and automatically set when the product page is loaded (The FooEvents Calendar extension is required).
- Hide the date from the combined date/slot: When creating bookable events that only use one slot per date, the two drop-downs are merged into one. You can now hide the date and only show the custom label text when using the combined date/slot selectors.
In order to take advantage of these updates, you will need to install the latest FooEvents for WooCommerce and FooEvents Bookings extensions. If you are new to FooEvents, take a look at the FooEvents Bookings Bundle which includes everything you will need to sell access to virtual events and bookable services.