Tutorial: Configuring the availability search (3 / 4)

Tutorial Table of Contents

part 1: Advanced integration set-up
part 2: Simple integration set-up
part 3: Different search modes
part 4: Changing the way the search results look and the information is displayed
Part 3 of 4: Different search modes
The default search mode simply searches for availability between the dates (or times) entered by the customer. In some cases the search box may look differently (e.g. when the duration of all of your resources is always fixed, in such case there’s no need to ask for the end time).

Planyo also lets you perform other search types. First of all, you can choose the flexible mode or the flexible hour mode. Unlike the normal mode, the flexible mode also find for shorter available periods within the search dates. The flexible hour mode only displays one date in the search box and searches for all available hours within this date. This is only useful with hour- or quarter-hour-based resources.

In order to switch to the flexible search modes, you either need to set the search type option in site settings / integrate with my website / widgets page / search box -- this will automatically set the search mode, or if you don’t have a separate search box, you can change the search mode by adding the range_search parameter to the attribute string (please see more info about the attribute string above).

Planyo also offers another search mode: upcoming availability search. In this mode there is no ‘search’ button, the results are displayed immediately. There is also no possibility to choose the dates, because the search simply returns all the periods in the next couple weeks when there is availability. It’s great to let your customers see last-minute availability information in a very clear way. You can also add other search criteria to this search (as number of persons etc.), as you can with the normal search. You can switch to the upcoming availability mode by choosing a different default mode option in the planyo plugin or by adding mode=upcoming_availability to the attribute string (see more about this above).

Continue to part 4 (Changing the way the search results look and the information is displayed) >>