How to Add Appointments to Google Calendar and Gmail
This tutorial will teach you how to connect Google Calendar, Gmail, and the JetAppointment plugin using the Make platform. This connection will automatically transfer bookings made on the website to your Google Calendar date slots and your and users' emails.
When users book appointments, it would be helpful if all appointments were shown on the Google Calendar schedule and sent to your email address. To connect the JetAppointment plugin to Google Calendar and Gmail, you could use Make (formerly Integromat). This tutorial will describe how to connect your website to administrator’s, provider’s, manager’s Google Calendar, and Gmail accounts. Also, you can connect JetBooking to users’ emails with the JetEngine form field. Proceed to this dedicated tutorial if you want to synchronize the JetAppointment plugin with the user’s Google Calendar account.
How to Connect the JetAppointment Plugin to Google Calendar
Set up the Make
Make is a free platform that allows you to connect apps and automate workflows using a no-code visual builder.
Sign in or sign up to the Make platform. After getting to the “My Lab” page, go to the “Scenarios”tabin the left-side menu and click on the “Create a new scenario” button in the upper right corner.
Hit the big plus button and choose the “Webhooks” module from the list of tools. A Webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. More about Custom Webhook you can find out in this Webhooks tutorial.
Then you’ll see the list of triggers and actions. You need to choose the Custom webhook.
Click on the new Webhooks module. Hit the “Add” and the “Save” button to enter the name for the Webhook.
After that, you will see the generated link, which you should copy to the clipboard. Then proceed to your WordPress website without closing the Make window.
Set up the Appointment Form
A detailed guide on how to create JetAppointment forms from scratch can be found here.
If you already have such a form, click to edit the one you want to connect with Make. In the Post-submit Actions / Notifications Settings block, you need to click “Add Notification” and choose the “Call a Webhook” Type for it. Paste the link to the Webhook URL field. Hit the “Apply Changes” and “Update” buttons.
Navigate to the front-end page with that form and submit it. After that, you should see the green note: “Successfully determinated” in the Webhook. Hit the “OK” button.
Adding the Google Calendar module
Click the “Add another module” button and insert the “Google Calendar” module.
Choose the Create an Event action.
Click the “Add” button near the Connection bar and connect Make to the Gmail account. Select your login for the Primary Calendar as the Calendar ID. As Event Name, choose as many items as you want, like price, user name and surname, user email, and so on. They will be shown in the Google Calendar slots as additional information about appointments. The item names are assimilated with the field names from the form that is connected with the Webhook. Drag and drop slot item to the Start Date field and slotEnd item to the End Date field.
Since the date and time are saved in the timestamp, they need to be parsed. Click on the “Date and Time” icon and drag and drop the parseDate function to the Start Date and End Date fields. Prescribe the dates in such a way as it is shown on the screenshot. X is the Unix timestamp (the date format of the input). Other tokens for date/time parsing you could get here.
The slot and slotEnd items work for appointments with the time frames, but if you need to book an event only by days (not by hours), you need to drag and drop the date item.
Don’t forget to click on the “OK” button when you finish.
To run the activated scenario, you could set up the schedule. Enable the “sheduling” toggle at the bottom left corner and push the “Schedule setting” icon. You can read more about it in the Scheduling a scenario article and choose the most appropriate option.
And then, hit the “Save” icon on the panel of controls at the bottom of the page.
Now, go to the Google Calendar service. After you run a new scenario, the appointments will appear in the schedule.
How to Connect Gmail to the JetAppointment Plugin and Google Calendar
In the Tools panel, click on the “Flow Control” button. Drag and drop the Router module and connect it with the Webhook and Google Calendar. Hit the “Add anoter module” button, add the Gmail module and then pick the Send an email action.
Click the “Add” button near the Connection bar and connect Make to your Gmail account. You also need to define the email address for the letters to be sent To, the Subject of the letter, the Content, and the Attachments. To fill the bars, you can use the data users will put into the form fields, just choose the ID of a particular field. In the To field, you can add your admin email and the form field for users’ emails to both you and the user who books the appointment getting the information about the booking with the email.
Push the “OK” button and Run the scenario.
That’s it. By now, the Google Calendar and the JetAppointment plugin are connected to show all appointments on the schedule. Also, with Gmail, you and your users will receive information about appointments with emails.