The public availability page

A page for your own website showing the green a week at a time: the days across the top, your session times down the side, and every rink inside each box as either taken or free. It opens on the current week and scrolls forward as far as you allow.

It is meant for the outside of the club rather than the members’ portal. A visitor thinking of joining, or a member checking on their phone before setting off, sees the same picture without signing in — and a signed-in member who is allowed to book gets a way straight through to the booking form from any free rink.

Putting it on your site

Either press Create the availability page for me under Settings → Booking Rules, which makes and publishes a page at /booking-diary/ — or paste [pvl_booking_diary] into any page of your own. Then add it to your website menu, which is the step people forget.

How far ahead it looks

Public diary shows … months ahead in the same settings section, three by default. This is deliberately not the same thing as your booking window: a club that only opens booking a fortnight out may still want the summer visible, so people can see the green is spoken for on finals day without being able to book it. One page can override the setting with [pvl_booking_diary months="6"].

Common questions

I pressed the button twice. Have I got two pages?

No. The button only appears when no page can be found, and the code behind it looks in three places first — the address it has stored, the /booking-diary/ slug, and any published page that already contains the shortcode. A club that built the page by hand gets that one adopted rather than a second one created, and an existing page is never rewritten.

I deleted the page. How do I get it back?

Return to Settings → Booking Rules. Once the old page is gone the button comes back on its own, because it checks whether the page is actually published rather than trusting what it last recorded.

How is this different from the members' booking grid?

The grid at [pvl_rink_view] is for members and lives in the portal, with a day view showing who is on each rink by name. The diary is for the public side of your site: same information about what is free, but framed for somebody who may not be a member yet, and with the week horizon rather than a booking window.

Can visitors see members' names?

No. A taken rink reads simply Booked on this page. Who is playing on Thursday is the club’s business rather than the public’s, and this page is meant for the open internet. Members still see the names on the members’ booking grid, which is behind a login and is the right place for it. Roll-ups, league fixtures and “v Anytown BC” keep their labels, because those name an event rather than a person — and showing them as a bare “Taken” would only have people ringing the secretary to ask what is on.

Who can actually book from this page?

Only somebody signed in to your website whose membership record says they may book — paid up, and within their membership type’s season. Everybody else, including a signed-in visitor with no membership record, sees the same picture with no Book links on it at all. Before 9.99.208 the check was wrong and offered the links to any logged-in user; the booking form always refused them, but they were invited to try and only told why afterwards.

The week is squashed, or too wide for my page.

The diary spreads to the width of the window by default, because seven days side by side need room and a theme’s reading column is usually about seven hundred pixels. If your page has a sidebar and that pushes the layout about, use [pvl_booking_diary width="container"] and it will stay inside the column instead. Either way it never scrolls sideways — the columns share whatever room there is and the text sizes itself to fit.

The forward arrow is greyed out.

That is the horizon. Raise the months setting if you want people to look further ahead.

Can people scroll back to last month?

No — it stops at the current week. A past week tells a visitor nothing useful, and the point of the page is what is still available.

Roll-ups and matches are showing. Can I hide them?

They are shown on purpose: a rink taken by a roll-up or a home friendly is not available, and saying only “taken” would leave people asking why. They come from the same place the members’ grid reads, so the two pages always agree.