Component Overview

The main key concepts for this component are services, staff members and clients.

• Services as the name suggest are representing the activities in which someone is interested to make a reservation, like a haircut in case of a beauty salon, or blood test in case of a medical center, or a meeting with a lawyer in case of a lawyer office.

• Staff members are the persons who are executing the activity, so in case of a beauty salon for the service haircut is the hairdresser, in case of a blood test is the nurse or doctor, in case of a meeting is the lawyer.

• Clients are the visitors of your website interested in making the appointment, basically anyone. The component workflow is very simple: you, as the website administrator, add and make available different services from which your clients can choose to reserve.

A client cannot choose only a service, he must also choose the person who will offer the selected service. That's why next to services and clients, you must also have the providers of these services, and those are your staff members.

A staff member is really a Joomla user who is the provider of one or more services. Adding staff members can be done only in the back-end area, by the administrator who must attach an existing Joomla user account to the staff member account. This is to allow the staff member to login using his Joomla credentials.

A staff member can choose the services to provide. So, when a client will browse through your list of services when he chooses a service he will get to see a list with all the staff members available for reservation. You can watch a related video here: here.

Each staff member has his own management area, available in the front-end via a menu item (website administrator must create this menu item). This allows keeping the Joomla administration area (the back-end) private. To access the management area a staff member must be logged in using his Joomla user credentials. Inside this area he can manage his appointments, he can customize the appointment process, he can also change different options, etc.

In the back-end area (Joomla administration area), the only actions that must be done are adding services and creating staff members. Everything else is handled by the staff member. So the back-end is for you the administrator while the front-end is for the staff members and clients.