Lots of Features

Easy!Appointments offers some interesting extras. First, it is a responsive web application. You will find Easy!Appointments easy to use and pleasing to the eye from either a workstation or a mobile device.

It also supports the (infamous) cookie warnings, terms of service and privacy policy pop-ups, and a very necessary CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from bots.

In addition, Easy!Appointments supports multiple languages. Both customers and employees can select their preferred language when using Easy!Appointments.

Finally, Easy!Appointments integrates with other Internet services. In particular, it features integration with WordPress [4] via a plugin and synchronizes with Google Calendar (Figure 8) [5].

Figure 8: Employees can check upcoming appointments using the web calendar.

At the time of writing, a GitHub project lets you create an Easy!Appointments client for Android[6], but no official releases are listed at this time.

Hidden Drawbacks

While very handy, Easy!Appointments is not free from issues. Some of the features are barely documented or not documented at all. For example, as mentioned above, Easy!Appointments can be configured to interface with an email server (in order to deliver email notifications) in a number of ways, but this is not mentioned anywhere in the README file and is not configurable via the admin toolbar. Instead, a user must edit the application/config/email.php file manually. While not a big deal, this could be handled better.

Easy!Appointments sorely lacks functionality when it comes to appearance customization. There is no theme engine, and it looks like the user is expected to edit the relevant CSS rules. While certainly not an obstacle for a web designer, accessing the code directly in order to customize it may not be as easy as the name implies.

Conclusion

The Easy!Appointments web appointment scheduler is easy and quick to deploy and includes most of the functionality any small business may need. It supports internationalization, email notifications, CAPTCHAs, and legal notices, and the technical requirements are easy to meet. On the other hand, documentation is sparse, and it appears that the lead developer's business model is to sell support to users who want site customization.

The Author

Rubén Llorente is a mechanical engineer who ensures that the IT security measures for a small clinic are both legally compliant and safe. In addition, he is an OpenBSD enthusiast and a weapons collector.