Amelia
An Enterprise-Level WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin
Overview
Amelia is a tool for small business owners that run their own WordPress websites to automate accepting online appointment bookings and online payments. It supports multiple services and service categories, multiple employees, multiple business locations, and covers numerous functionalities necessary for the smooth workflow of a company that relies on appointments - such as a hairdresser salon or a barbershop, business coach agency, law consultants, etc.
Timeline
While the idea of the plugin and the first development attempts are dated back in 2014, we officially kicked off the project in Q2 of 2017. The initial ideation and discovery phase took about a couple of months, as we did not want to rush the project, we took time to collect all the information from the existing solutions, as well as the typical pains users have. In June we started the mockup and design phase, and in August the actual development.
By the end of 2017, we had a working core of the booking engine, yet it took another 6 months to polish both the back-end and front-end, test and debug and write user documentation, so the project was officially released in June 2018.
Project is still in its active development phase, we have several major functionalities to finalize and release in next month, and even more to come in future!
Key Challenges
Amelia is one of the few plugins that was built with an ‘enterprise’ approach to architecture and tech solutions. The back-end engine of the plugin is built with Domain-Driven Design approach, and uses Slim framework to implement an API that is encapsulated in WordPress. Amelia is extremely cautious to the WordPress infrastructure and is only initializing it’s engine when an Amelia-related API request is received, in other cases it does not occupy any runtime server resources. Front-end is built with Vue.js, so all the plugin’s pages act as single-page apps.
Key Results
Amelia received high praises during its initial launch period and during our first presentation of the plugin that we performed during WordCamp EU conference in June 2018.
Amelia’s design was added by first customers to many large web design inspiration resources, as well as to the Product Hunt.
Amelia was awarded a Honorable Mention on Awwwards.
First 100 licenses of Amelia were sold within 1.5 months after the release date.
Current Amelia’s rating on CodeCanyon is 5.00.