Explorates Booking

Description

Explorates Booking embeds your Explorates account directly in your WordPress pages and posts. Enter your organization ID once, pick a product, and your visitors can check availability and book without leaving your site.

Two ways to show a product:

• the booking calendar on its own, to drop under your own description;
• the full product page — photos, description, prices and booking — when you would rather not rewrite everything in WordPress.

This plugin requires an Explorates account. Explorates is a booking and e-commerce platform for tour and activity operators.

Features

• An “Explorates widget” block with a product picker, a display switch and a live preview inside the editor
• A [explorates_widget product="…"] shortcode for classic editors, page builders and widget areas, with type="page" for the full product page
• Global appearance settings (primary color, border, language, first day of the week, price on calendar days), overridable per shortcode
• A connection test and a preview on the settings screen, so you can check everything before publishing
• Your product list is fetched server-side and cached for one hour: your visitors’ browsers never call the Explorates API

The plugin does not reimplement the booking widget. It prints the official embed markup and loads the very same script your Explorates dashboard gives you, so the widget always behaves exactly as it does everywhere else.

The plugin runs on PHP 7.4, but PHP 8.1 or newer is recommended — PHP 7.4 is end of life and no longer receives security fixes.

Useful links

• Official website
• How the booking system works
• Pricing
• Book a demo

Source code

This plugin is fully GPL-2.0-or-later. The block editor script shipped in
build/index.js is compiled from the human-readable sources included in the
plugin under src/block/ (index.js, edit.js, block.json).

It is built with @wordpress/scripts, with no custom configuration. The build
tooling ships with the plugin, so from the plugin directory, with Node.js
installed:

npm install && npm run build

That regenerates build/ from src/block/. The minified output may differ
slightly from one webpack release to the next; src/block/ is the
authoritative version of this code.

No other file in this plugin is compiled, minified or obfuscated.

External services

This plugin connects to two services operated by Explorates. Both are required for the plugin to do anything at all.

1. Explorates API — https://api.explorates.com

Used in the WordPress admin only, to list the published products of your organization so you can pick one in the block editor or on the settings screen.

• When: when an administrator opens the plugin settings screen, clicks “Test connection” or “Refresh the product list”, and when an editor opens a page containing the Explorates block. Responses are cached for one hour.
• What is sent: your Explorates organization ID, sent as an HTTP header from your server. No visitor data, no personal data and no site content is sent.
• Requests are made server-side. Your visitors’ browsers never contact this service.

2. Explorates booking widget — https://widget.explorates.com

The booking widget itself, loaded in your visitors’ browsers on any page where you inserted the block or the shortcode. This is the service that displays availability and takes bookings.

• When: on every front-end page view that contains the widget.
• What is sent: your organization ID, the product ID and the appearance options you configured, plus whatever your visitor enters in the booking form (name, email and booking details) when they make a booking. The visitor’s IP address and browser user agent reach the service as part of the request, as with any embedded content.
• Analytics: the widget loads Explorates’ own product analytics (PostHog, self-proxied through the widget host) to measure how the booking funnel performs. This runs inside the widget, is operated by Explorates, and is covered by the privacy policy linked below.
• In the WordPress admin, the same service is loaded in an iframe to render the previews on the settings screen and in the block editor.

Both services are operated by Explorates and are what the plugin exists to display; installing and configuring it with your organization ID is what enables them. Nothing is sent anywhere until you enter that ID.

Terms of use: https://www.explorates.com/en/terms-of-use/
Privacy policy: https://www.explorates.com/en/privacy-policy/