How to Order Services or Employees in Drop-Down Menu (Appointment Booking Plugin 2.4.0)
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Need a specific order for the services, locations, categories, or staff in the drop-downs of your booking form? It’s possible from the version 2.4.0 of the Appointment Booking plugin!
The new feature allows you to manually assign the order value to the mentioned filters so that the drop-down menu shows your items in the right order.
But not just that! Let’s take a look at the recent plugin improvements.
Use the new ordering feature
What’s ordering and when to use it?
Some clients using our WordPress appointment booking plugin for businesses like salons or spas, raised a common frustration: the dropdowns in the for services, categories, or employees in the booking form appear in a random, unsorted order, which can be hard for some customers to find what’s needed.
That means customers had to sometimes scroll through long or messy lists (hello booking errors or drop-offs!), especially if you provide a lot of services.
Here are a few real cases we’ve dealt with:
- Salons needed haircut services listed alphabetically.
- Children’s programs needed to show age-based order (youngest to oldest).
- Barbershops wanted a specific barber to appear first.
- Spa owners were looking for organized categories in their booking forms.
That’s because, by default, WordPress custom post types (and those like Services or Employees belong to them) often display in the order they were created or by internal ID, unless the plugin offers a dedicated ordering control. Many appointment plugins do not offer a built-in, user-friendly way to reorder these items for the front-end booking form, leaving them in seemingly random order. That was so in our appointment scheduler as well.
We’ve changed that by adding the “Order” field to individual custom post types that can now define how services/locations/employees/categories display in the appointment plugin’s frontend dropdowns.
That is, it’s not fully automated, where you can choose an ordering type but rather a manual approach, where you can control the order for every needed item.
How does ordering work?
By default, all the ordering for your items is not changed, i.e. it’s kept just as you had before updating to the plugin version 2.4.0.
However, if you need to change the order of the services, employees, locations or categories you use in the booking form as filters, the new ordering feature can easily do just that!
You’ll notice a new ‘Order’ field when you go to the relevant menu – Services, Employees, Categories, or Locations.
To control the order in which items appear in the dropdown list, simply assign a number to each item based on the desired position – click ‘Quick Edit’ after hovering on the item:
For example, set the order to 1 for the service you want to appear first. Super easy.
Note: Once you begin setting the order, you need to assign an order value to all items within that menu (whether Services, Employees, Categories, or Locations) for the sorting to work correctly. You can’t assign it to just a few.
However, if you have many items but only want to set the order for a few of them, you can use a negative number to make items appear first in the list (e.g., -2 to be displayed first, -1 to be displayed second, etc. – and others randomly by ID).
Service categories now display a proper hierarchy
Do you use many categories for your services? Did you know you can create parent categories to organize your categories even further?
However, if you already had categories set up, the Service Category dropdown did not display the parent-child structure clearly before the update. All categories appeared in a single list, with no visual distinction between main categories and subcategories.
Now, this has been improved in the latest version 2.4.0!
You will notice a clearer hierarchy of service subcategories in the dropdown, making it easier for you and your clients to use.
Also new – Video event links in the customer calendar
Moreover, in this plugin version, we’ve added support for video event links in customer calendars that are created with the Video Conferencing addon for Appointment Booking.
As you know, with the video conference plugin extension, online meeting details, whether for Zoom or Google Meet, are automatically generated and sent to customers as soon as they book a session through the appointment scheduling form.
Now these links are also in the client calendar!
This means that when customers add a booked online event to their calendar (the last step of checkout), automatically generated links to Zoom or Google Meet will also be added to the event information in the client’s calendar.
Note: the ‘Add to your calendar?’ option must be enabled in the form.
Have you tested the Appointment Booking wizard yet?
There’s another feature we added earlier that we haven’t covered on the blog yet, and it’s especially useful for new users!
If you’re working on client sites and often need to set up fresh installations, you’ll find this handy: In the earlier version (2.3.0) of the Appointment Booking plugin, we introduced a setup wizard. Have you tried it yet?
It guides you through adding your first service, location, and more, step by step, so you can get your first service and schedule up and running quickly – which can be truly handy for clients who just get started with the plugin.
Moreover, you can run the wizard at any moment by going to Appointments > Help > Run Wizard.
So, why use the new ordering feature?
No one knows better than you how to create the best customer experience, and the ordering feature helps you tremendously. You can now control the flow in which your services, categories, or staff are displayed to suit your priorities (e.g., best-selling service first, junior-to-senior classes, top-performing barber featured at the top, etc.).
So, gain more flexibility in managing your booking form by using this simple ordering feature – ultimately, it can drastically improve your customers’ booking experience!
Had a bug? Many of them have also been fixed! Take a look at fixed bugs.
Let us know which feature you need most in the appointment scheduling plugin!
