New booking flow and bike grid: a major update for Simple Bike Rental Pro
Today, I’m pleased to announce a major update to Simple Bike Rental Pro, introducing new features designed to make the booking process clearer, more flexible, and more in line with user expectations.
This release represents a significant improvement in the quality of the bicycle browsing and booking experience.
Two new shortcodes to improve the booking process
With the new bicycle grid shortcode, you can finally display all available bikes in a neat and modern layout, complete with:
- clickable images
- clearly displayed daily prices
- “Check availability” button for each bicycle
The grid is fully responsive, allowing you to choose the number of columns on desktop and automatically adapting to tablets and mobile devices. You can also display only one type of bicycle using a type="..." option in the shortcode.
Flow: “catalog → bike page”
One of the most requested features is now available. Simple Bike Rental Pro now supports an alternative route that is more similar to a catalog:
- The user browses the bicycle grid.
- choose a specific bike
- Access the dedicated page with details, a large photo, and a booking form.
This approach improves clarity, especially when the site offers multiple models or types of bicycles.
Availability mini-calendars (optional)
On the individual bike page, you can now display mini-availability calendars, providing a quick overview of upcoming months.
Calendars are for informational purposes only and do not replace the final availability check, which the system always performs at the time of booking.
Greater control, greater flexibility
This update makes the plugin even more adaptable to different types of sites:
- rentals with a limited number of bikes or more extensive catalogs
- simple sites or more complex structures
- quick flows or step-by-step guided paths
All without compromising the reliability of the availability management system.
Under the hood: versioned caching improvements
Alongside the visible new features, this release also includes an internal improvement to the caching system. Cache entries related to availability and booking data are now versioned, allowing the plugin to invalidate and refresh cached data more precisely when changes occur.
This results in more reliable data consistency during updates and maintenance, while keeping the system fast and responsive, especially on sites with frequent bookings or complex availability rules.
See it in action
If you’d like to see the new booking flow and bike grid in action, you can explore the live demo and try the new shortcodes directly on a working installation.
For a complete explanation of all available options, configuration examples, and booking flows, the documentation has been updated accordingly.
Updated documentation
The documentation has been expanded to provide a detailed explanation of:
- the new shortcodes
- the possible configurations
- the various booking flows available
As always, the goal is to make Simple Bike Rental Pro easy to use while offering powerful functionality.
This update takes us one step further.
Enjoy your rental!