Not great with authentication

  • If you’re looking for a plug-n-play booking tool, this does the job as well as — or better than — many others out there.

    However, if you have a user workflow that’s just a little more than basic, you may have problems making this work for you. It’s not only a little odd the way it’s organized, but it’s also rather inflexible.

    For example, you’d think allowing a user to access their appointments would be an obvious feature. Well, it is a feature, but it’s ill-conceived. Here’s why…

    Your site may allow bookings for non-logged-in, anonymous users. That’s fine… in that case, Amelia will essentially create an “Amelia Customer” user when a booking is made. To access his/her upcoming appointments, that user will need to create a username and password *with Amelia* to access the “customer panel”. Or, if you specify, you can make the access to the “customer panel” not require a password… in this case, the customer will need to use a tokenized link sent via email to access their appointments.

    Not a really big deal, and it’s obviously necessary since if the user wasn’t already known at the time of the booking, and assuming there isn’t any sort of user login mechanism on your site… without Amelia doing the work of identifying the user (so they can access their appointments and not somebody else’s appointments), there isn’t any other way.

    But what if I don’t WANT my KNOWN (logged-in) users to have to create a separate Amelia login? Then the user will need to use the link in the email. But what if I don’t want to send an email… what if I just want my ALREADY LOGGED-IN USER to be able to simple view their appointments? There is no way.

    So in making the plugin work for both authenticated and unauthenticated users, the plugin has created unnecessary roadblocks for sites that ONLY function (for bookings at least) for authenticated users.

    It’s really poorly thought out… and unfortunately, by the time I finally got around to working through this with the site I’m building, I’m past my refund period so I’m out $$ AND I don’t have a solution working for my client that I’m happy with.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by ctmartin2020.
Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
  • Plugin Author ameliabooking

    (@ameliabooking)

    Hello there!

    Thank you for your feedback, it’s really valuable to us.

    The reason why Amelia’s log-in is different and separate from WordPress login is because it was simply asked for it to be like that by our customers. The amount of people saying “I don’t want my customers to log into WordPress” was really high when we created Amelia’s customer panel, so we developed it in that way.

    After some time, users like yourself asked for a feature that the panel is linked to the logged-in WordPress user, and we’ve added quite a lot of votes to that feature on our “to-do” list. Our developers will be working on this solution in the upcoming months, so it will probably be implemented relatively soon.

    Depending on how long ago you purchased the plugin, we may still be able to refund the purchase if this really is a deal-breaker. Please open a ticket on our official support platform (due to the rules of www.remarpro.com – we cannot provide a link to our official support platform here), and reference this review there, and our support managers will gladly see if there’s something we can do about this. Note that we’re bound by the rules of our reseller, and they block refund requests for us after a certain amount of time has passed.

    Kind regards!

    Hello
    I bought amelia and had the same problem
    I have an educational site for children and parents are now angry because their children have more than one login page and more than one account
    It is correct that booking an appointment only requires a WordPress account
    The user should not get lost between multiple accounts and pages
    ……
    You said that you are working to solve this problem …. I am writing this after more than 5 months of that!!!
    thank you

    Thread Starter ctmartin2020

    (@ctmartin2020)

    Yes, I can’t see how it would be difficult to at least pre-fill the Amelia sign-up credentials with the current logged-in user credentials. All of that can be obtained in the backend.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by ctmartin2020.

    Any news on the topic? What will the developers say?

    Charles

    (@charlesrodmell)

    I’ve just bought the plugin assuming that wordpress would be in charge of login and hit this issue – none my users will see the booking management unless they are already logged in, but now Amelia wants them to login again. Surely it should just notice if they are logged in and show their booked events straight away. I’ll have to ask for a refund. What’s everyone using instead once they hit this issue?

    Hi there, are there any updates on this issue? It is crazy that something as basic and intuitive as that is not part of the otherwise good plugin. I requested this feature (it should not be called a “feature” in my opinion as it is supposed to be in the core of such a plugin from the very beginning) a long time ago and it seems that very little progress, if any, has been made in that direction.

    Charles

    (@charlesrodmell)

    The solution I went with is to use Events Made Easy instead. It’s not actually particularly easy, but with the free version you can make it so that logged in users just see a list of events and press one to book. It’s also harder to make pretty (which Amelia has out of the box).

    Are there any updates on the ETA for this functionality?
    This is a dealbreaker for several of my clients, so I’m waiting on this before I can roll out Amelia as a solution.

    Is this still an issue or has it been fixed by now? It’s the only issue that is stopping me from buying the plugin right now.

    I need this too.
    Any ETA?

    Hallo Amelia WAKE UP.

    You even state Buddyboss / buddybress integration it is COMMUNITY plugins, meaning the users will be LOGGED IN. So why cant amelia work with that??? Need to login omg

    mesysel

    (@mesysel)

    This feature is essential for me also. I just cannot force my registered WP users to create another account within my pages just for booking.

    This really is something extremely bad thinking about the customer experience it sucks to do 2 logins, Is there no workaround, any script?

    Plugin Author ameliabooking

    (@ameliabooking)

    Hello everyone and thank you very much for your patience.

    In the meantime, our development team made it possible to use a single login for Amelia, WordPress, and WooCommerce, as well as some membership plugins. Please check the explanation below:

    In order to allow existing WordPress users to log both into WordPress (or WooCommerce, or some membership plugin) and Amelia using the same credentials, customers and employees in Amelia need to have “Amelia Customer” or “Amelia Employee” user role assigned to them. 

    If there’s a created WordPress user, but they don’t yet have anything purchased through Amelia, you need to enable “Automatically create Amelia Customer user” in Amelia Settings/Roles/Customer, and then – after they log into their WordPress user, once they land on Amelia’s booking page, their details will already be populated, and once they purchase the appointment, they’ll be added to Amelia/Customers; linked to the WordPress user, and they will be able to visit the Amelia Customer Panel without logging in (since they’re already logged in as a WordPress user).

    If you already created a user with “Amelia Customer” but they haven’t purchased anything with Amelia yet, that user won’t be linked to any customers you have in Amelia, so before they are able to log into Amelia’s Customer Panel, they either need to book an appointment while they’re logged into WordPress, WooCommerce, or a membership plugin, or you need to create a customer by going into Amelia/Customers/Add Customer. When you create a customer, link that customer to the WordPress user, and that’s it. After that, they will be able to log in with the same password that’s used for logging into WordPress.

    Please take a look at our video about this: https://youtu.be/nm7f7RDSYow

    Please note: The video linked above is a year old and since then we’ve updated the plugin even more. Since v6.2.3, the password change of Customer/Employee also applies to linked WordPress users.

    Charles

    (@charlesrodmell)

    This is not a valid solution. Showing the email / name fields, prefilled or otherwise, allows a paid site member to enter someone else’s details (who is not a member) in the booking. It’s broken. What we need is a logged in user that has paid for access to the site already to just click book / time / date / submit (without having any distraction by user fields) and then it’s done. Maybe it’s as simple as the option to “hide user fields during booking if user is logged into wordpress”?

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Charles. Reason: added suggestion at end
Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
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