Search Box

Hello Andrew,

Thanks for your message. We understand that you would like to create the pages of your rooms manually, but you should not use Shortcodes on pages that already generate contents.

The use of the Shortcodes is recommended to have complete pages generated by Vik Booking, comprehensive of texts, descriptions, photos, availability calendars and booking form. As you said, if you were to use such Shortcodes of type “Room Details” on a page of your website that is already describing your room, then you would end up having duplicate contents. In this case, if you like to use Shortcodes, the only solution available is to hide the contents generated by the Shortcode of Vik Booking via CSS. Every section generated by Vik Booking will wrapped inside a specific element with a precise class attribute, and by using the apposite custom CSS code for your Theme (or the apposite CSS file of Vik Booking for customization), you should simply hide those contents with a proper display: none; style.

Otherwise, another alternative solution compatible with any page-builder plugin, is to rather include a widget of Vik Booking inside your page. In this case, the widget “Search Form” would be perfect in your page that describes the room. Every widget comes with specific settings, and you could use the one to force the booking over that specific room-id by using the apposite drop down menu in the widget’s settings.

Shortcodes are not meant to display contents in a modular way. Shortcodes will simply render complete pages, and they are useful to build dynamic contents by reading the settings of the wp-admin section of Vik Booking. This means that creating a “Rooms List” page statically is not recommended. You should rather use the apposite Shortcode of Vik Booking that will render that page for you with the proper navigation links.

Regarding the Channel Manager: only availability, rates, restrictions, bookings and guest reviews are synced automatically. The Channel Manager will not transmit any description text to the OTAs. You will rather have a dedicated interface to manage the contents on each OTA (when the so called Content/Listing APIs are supported, so this changes from channel to channel).

We hope this helps!

The VikWP Team

Hello, Thanks for the fast reply!

OK widgets is a new one, I looked at the VIK widget loader, and it all seemed related to your themes?

I use Divi Theme builder, if the widgets work with it that would be brilliant!!

Andrew

PS I am sure I read on eJ4 that some of the OTA’s Vik feeds them the images and descriptions

Hello Andrew,

You don’t need the plugin “Vik Widgets Loader” as that will declare some widgets just for our Themes. What you need to use is rather the widgets that come with Vik Booking: search form, currency converter etc..

The Theme Builder plugin should support any “legacy widget” beside the new “blocks”, so all you need to do is to browse all the widgets available in your website to find the ones that belong to Vik Booking. The search form widget is the one you see in the official demo website of Vik Booking, because in the home page we do not recommend using shortcodes, and so all our clients that would like to immediately offer a booking form in their home page are using the apposite widget “Search Form”.

Ref the Channel Manager and the OTAs: we do support the Contents/Listings API as well as the Photo API with many OTAs (Airbnb, Booking.com etc..), but that doesn’t mean that your Channel Manager will automatically push your Vik Booking photos to the OTAs. There’s a dedicated interface for each channel that allows you to manage the listings/rooms of the various OTA accounts. This is because most of the times the OTA accounts already contain the room information. Our Channel Manager simply allows you to manage those contents directly from your website, but nothing is synced automatically in regards of “contents” such as photos or descriptions.

Hello,

Thanks tried the widget, and it would be perfect, but it’s trapped in the sidebar? Cannot upload an image, but I guess you know even with 100% in custom CSS it’s not central and not 100% of the content width.

I bought your Plaza theme ages ago, but couldn’t get it the way I wanted it to look.

Is there a way I can copy and paste from the Plaza theme files to my Divi theme or WordPress folders to get your custom JS & CSS for the widget search boxes?

For other unrelated questions, best to open a new thread?

Thanks

Andrew

Hello Andrew,

If you use the WordPress native functions, then yes, widgets must be placed on specific sidebars of your Theme, but if you publish the widget on a page through your Theme Builder plugin, then you should be able to place it in the desired position.

Do not worry about CSS conflicts if the styling isn’t perfect. There’s no need to copy and paste the whole CSS code of our Theme, you can just adjust the styling in your Theme. In the end, that must be a matter of paddings, margins and dimensions.

For such specific situations we would prefer if you could open a ticket from our website so that our designers could help you adjust some CSS code. If we were to post some CSS snippets on this forum, this would only help your situation, so that’s why we prefer if you open a ticket from our website. You can also use the contact form in case you don’t have a paid account to open a support ticket.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team

Hi,

I think the issue here is Divi Theme builder, the only option for inserting a widget is as a sidebar.

I have a free account and my client has paid for Channel and Booking, I do not really want him seeing my support requests…

Ok I will open a ticket, been struggling with it for a few hours last night and today!

Hi Andrew,

If your client has purchased our plugins then you can ask them to set your account as a “contributor” of the license so that also your account on our website will be eligible for opening support tickets.

If not, just use the contact form available at the bottom of the home page of our website (“Contact us”).

This way our designers will try to help you publish the widget properly.

Thank you.