RideCab Documentation

1. System Requirements

2. Installation

1. Upload the plugin Go to WordPress Admin → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. Select the ridecab.zip file and click Install Now.
2. Activate Click Activate Plugin. RideCab will automatically create all required database tables.
3. Confirm WooCommerce is active RideCab requires WooCommerce 7.0+. If WooCommerce is not active, an admin notice will appear and the plugin will not load.
4. Activate your licence Go to RideCab → License and enter the key sent to you after purchase. Until it is activated, every feature stays disabled.
5. Configure Settings Navigate to RideCab → Settings and complete at minimum the General and Maps tabs.
6. Add a vehicle Go to RideCab → Vehicles → Add New. Set a name, pricing type, and rates.
7. Embed the booking form Add the shortcode [ridecab_booking_form] to any page or post.

3. General Settings

Found at RideCab → Settings → General.

4. Maps & Location Settings

Found at RideCab → Settings → Maps.

Google Maps Setup

You need two separate API keys from Google Cloud Console:

Other Settings

5. Appearance Settings

Found at RideCab → Settings → Appearance.

6. Email Settings

Found at RideCab → Settings → Emails.

Automatic Emails

A single checkbox at the top of the tab, ticked by default, decides whether RideCab sends its own booking email at all.

Untick it when you want to write your own emails, or when you drive the booking flow from WooCommerce statuses rather than from RideCab.

Company Information Fields

The Booking Email

RideCab sends one confirmation email per booking, when the order reaches Processing or On Hold. The customer receives it, and the store admin receives the very same message as a hidden BCC — so the two can never drift apart in wording.

The admin's copy additionally carries the customer's name, email and phone; those stay hidden on the customer's own copy.

WooCommerce's New Order, Processing Order and On Hold emails are suppressed for RideCab orders while automatic emails are on, so nobody receives the same booking twice.

What Appears in the Email

• A route map image showing pickup (A), stops and destination (B)
• Company logo, name, address, phone, contact email and tax numbers
• Booking reference number
• Pickup address, any intermediate stops, and destination
• Pickup date & time
• Vehicle name, passenger count and luggage count
• Estimated distance and duration
• Total price and payment method
• Customer notes, if entered

Template Overrides

Email templates follow the standard WooCommerce override path. Copy the files to your theme to customise them without losing changes on plugin update:

Translation

All strings inside the email templates use __( '...', 'ridecab' ) and are fully translatable. RideCab bundles .mo files for Arabic, German, Spanish, and French. When a customer's WordPress locale is set, WooCommerce switches to that locale before sending the customer email, then restores the site locale — so the customer receives the email in their own language automatically.

7. Vehicles

Found at RideCab → Vehicles → Add New.

Each vehicle type has its own pricing model, limits, and display options. Common fields:

8. Availability & Capacity

Two independent controls that decide which vehicles a customer is allowed to pick. Both are off by default, so updating the plugin never changes how your existing form behaves — switch them on at RideCab → Settings → General.

Passenger Capacity

Without this option, every active vehicle is offered whatever the party size: a customer searching for 7 people still sees a 3-seat saloon in the results. Enable Passenger Capacity and any vehicle whose Max Passengers is below the requested number is greyed out, cannot be selected, and shows the reason — “Saloon: maximum 3 passengers.”

The card stays visible on purpose. Removing it entirely leaves the customer wondering whether you run that vehicle at all; greying it out tells them it exists but is too small for this trip.

Fleet Availability

Set Fleet Quantity on each vehicle (RideCab → Vehicles) to the number of cars of that type you actually own — 2 saloons, 1 minibus. Enable Fleet Availability and a vehicle type disappears from the offer once every one of its units is already booked over the requested time slot. The other types stay bookable: running out of saloons does not take your minibus off the market.

A vehicle left at 0 is treated as unlimited, which is what every vehicle starts as after the update. Nothing changes until you fill the field in.

How a time slot is measured

A ride holds its vehicle from the pickup time until the trip ends, plus the Turnaround buffer set in General Settings (60 minutes by default) to cover the driver getting back into circulation.

Cancelled bookings release their vehicle immediately. Every other status — confirmed, driver assigned, in progress, completed — keeps it held for its window.

9. Pricing Types

10. Surge Pricing (Surcharges)

Found at RideCab → Surge Pricing → Add New.

Surcharges are applied on top of the vehicle strategy subtotal. Three trigger types:

Each rule can be a flat amount (€15), a percentage (+25%), or a replacement per-km rate — see below.

Rules have a Priority field — higher numbers are evaluated first. Multiple rules can match and stack.

Use the Vehicle Application checkboxes to limit which vehicle types a surcharge applies to.

Several date ranges in one rule

A date-based rule holds as many ranges as you need. Pick a start and an end, press Add date range, repeat. The rule fires when the pickup falls inside any one of them, so a whole school-holiday calendar lives in a single rule instead of one rule per period.

The same has always been true of day-and-time rules: Add time stacks as many weekday windows as you like.

Replacing the per-km rate

Set Price increase to Replace the per-km rate and the rule stops adding to the fare: it sets the price per kilometre outright for the period it covers. You type the tariff you actually charge — 3.50 — instead of working out the percentage that gets you there from the vehicle's standing rate.

Each vehicle covered by the rule gets its own rate field, so one rule carries a whole column of your price list:

Your everyday tariff stays on the vehicle itself; you only write a rule for the periods that differ. Leave a vehicle's rate empty and the rule's own Increase value is used for it, which is handy when every vehicle shares one tariff.

11. Geofence Rules

Found at RideCab → Geofence Rules → Add New.

Geofence rules override or augment the fare based on the physical location of the pickup and/or dropoff point. Each rule has two zones: Location 1 (pickup) and Location 2 (dropoff).

Zone Types

Price Types

Direction

How to Create an Airport → Station Fixed Fare

1. Set Location 1 type to "Precise location" and draw a polygon around the airport terminal area. Make it generous.
2. Set Location 2 type to "Precise location" and draw a polygon around the train station area.
3. Set Price type to "Fixed fare" and enter the amount (e.g. €100).
4. Check the vehicles the rule should apply to in Vehicle Application.
5. Set Status to Active and click Publish.

12. Booking Form

The booking form is a 3-step flow embedded via the [ridecab_booking_form] shortcode.

Time Picker (12h / 24h)

The time picker automatically detects your WordPress time format (Settings → General → Time Format).

• If the format contains g or h (PHP 12-hour chars), the 12h picker is shown with an AM/PM selector embedded inside the hour field.
• Otherwise the 24h picker is shown (00h–23h).
• Slots that have passed, and slots falling inside your Minimum Booking Advance, are hidden. The calendar is bounded by both advance limits, and opens on the first bookable day.

Instant Booking Tab

When enabled on a booking form (Forms → Edit → Enable Instant Booking), a second tab appears with a simplified time-slot picker for quick same-day bookings.

13. Booking Management

Found at RideCab → Bookings. Each booking row links to a detail page with two postboxes:

• Customer Information — name, email, phone, ride date & time.
• Trip Details — route, vehicle, distance, duration, fare breakdown, driver assignment, admin notes.

Booking Statuses

The status a booking starts on

By default a booking is created as Confirmed: the order came in, the ride is on. If you vet work before committing to it, set Settings → General → Default Booking Status to Pending and every new booking waits here for you to move it on.

14. Calendar

Found at RideCab → Calendar. One menu, and a dropdown at the top of the screen chooses which calendar is in use — one at a time.

The choice is saved, and only the selected calendar loads: no unused menus, no unused routes.

15. Google Calendar

Bookings are written to Google Calendar and kept in step: created when an order reaches Processing, On Hold or Completed, updated when the ride changes, and deleted when it is cancelled or refunded.

Who connects what

You cannot connect a driver's account for them — each person authorises their own. Reassigning a ride moves the event from one driver's calendar to the other's automatically.

One-time setup

Google requires every site to identify itself before it may write to a calendar. The Calendar screen walks you through it; in short:

1. Create a Google Cloud project at console.cloud.google.com, signed in with your company Google account.
2. Enable the Google Calendar API for that project.
3. Fill in the OAuth consent screen — type External, an app name, a contact email — then press Publish app.
4. Create an OAuth client of type Web application, and paste in the redirect URI shown on the RideCab Calendar screen, exactly as displayed.
5. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret into RideCab and save.
6. Press Connect, approve, and tell your drivers to do the same from their profile.

How it behaves

• Event contents: booking number, pickup and destination in the title, the pickup address as the location, and the customer, phone, passengers, distance and fare in the description.
• Duration: the estimated trip time, or one hour when unknown.
• Refresh tokens are encrypted in the database, so a database dump does not hand over access to real calendars.
• Writes run in the background on a scheduled event: checkout is never slowed down, and a Google outage never fails an order.
• If access is revoked on Google's side, the connection is marked disconnected and an admin notice tells you which account stopped working.
• Recent sync failures are listed at the bottom of the Calendar screen with the exact message from Google.

16. Invoices

Found at RideCab → Invoices.

Generate a printable PDF invoice for any booking. Click Generate on a booking row — a new tab opens with a formatted invoice that auto-triggers the browser's Print dialog. Use Save as PDF from the print dialog.

Invoice Settings

Found at RideCab → Invoices → Settings tab. Configure:

• Company name, logo, address, phone, email, website
• SIREN / company registration number and VAT/TVA number
• Invoice number prefix and padding (e.g. INV- + 4 digits → INV-0001)
• Primary accent colour and footer text
• Signature image (PNG with transparent background recommended)

Templates

17. Drivers

Driver management is disabled by default. Enable it at RideCab → Settings → General → Enable Driver Management.

Once enabled, the Drivers submenu appears. Each driver record links to a WordPress user account. Fields include:

• Linked WP user (for login access)
• License number
• Phone
• Calendar colour (used in the built-in calendar)
• Status: Active / Inactive / Suspended
• Commission rate (%)

Assign a driver on the booking detail page. The built-in calendar then shows the booking in that driver's colour, and — if Google Calendar is in use and the driver has connected their account — the ride appears in their own phone calendar.

18. Licensing

Found at RideCab → License. Until a valid key is activated, RideCab loads only its Dashboard and License pages: no booking form, no admin screens, no REST routes.

19. WooCommerce Integration

RideCab uses WooCommerce as its payment engine. The flow is:

1. Booking form submitted — fare calculated server-side via POST /wp-json/ridecab/v1/fare/estimate.
2. Ride added to WC cart as a virtual product with the calculated price.
3. Customer redirected to WC checkout — all WC payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal, SumUp, bank transfer, cash on delivery, etc.) are available automatically.
4. Server-side price recalculation on checkout submit — the price is recalculated via POST /wp-json/ridecab/v1/cart/add to prevent tampering.
5. WC order created — all booking data stored in WC order meta with the _ridecab_ prefix.
6. RideCab booking record created in the ridecab_bookings table.

Taking payment only after you accept

Some operators want to vet a ride before charging for it. WooCommerce does this natively, with no code: place the order through a gateway that takes no money — Cheque renamed to something like "Booking request" — so it lands on On Hold. Review it, then switch the order to Pending payment and use Order actions → Send order details to customer. That email carries a payment link.

Key WC Meta Keys

20. Shortcodes

[ridecab_booking_form]

[ridecab_booking_form form_id="2"]

21. Translations

RideCab is 100% translation-ready. All strings use the text domain ridecab.

Bundled translations (in /languages/):

To add a language, translate the strings with Poedit, save as ridecab-{locale}.po (e.g. ridecab-it_IT.po), compile to .mo, and upload both to the plugin's /languages/ directory. WordPress loads the right file from the site language.

22. Developer Hooks

RideCab exposes a small number of hooks so a site can change pricing or notification behaviour from a companion plugin, with no edit to RideCab's own files and nothing to redo after an update. The list is deliberately short: everything below is in use and will keep working across releases.

ridecab_fare_calculated

Filters the assembled fare breakdown just before the calculator returns it. This runs for every price the plugin produces — the live estimate in the booking form and the price charged at checkout both pass through it, so a change here cannot make the two disagree.

apply_filters( 'ridecab_fare_calculated', array $breakdown, array $params, array $vehicle )

Anything added to $breakdown['errors'] makes the booking form grey that vehicle out and show the message, which is how the built-in distance limits report themselves.

To reprice a ride on a distance other than the one travelled — billing a return to a fixed operating base, for instance — call the calculator again rather than redoing its arithmetic, and guard against re-entry:

add_filter( 'ridecab_fare_calculated', function ( $breakdown, $params, $vehicle ) {
    static $busy = false;
    if ( $busy ) { return $breakdown; }   // let the inner call through untouched

    $extra_km = my_distance_to_base( $params['dropoff_lat'], $params['dropoff_lng'] );
    if ( $extra_km <= 0 ) { return $breakdown; }

    $busy = true;
    $calc = new RideCab_Fare_Calculator();
    $repriced = $calc->calculate( array_merge( $params, [
        'distance_km' => $params['distance_km'] + $extra_km,
    ] ) );
    $busy = false;

    return $repriced;
}, 10, 3 );

ridecab_admin_booking_email_recipient

Filters the address list that receives a copy of every booking confirmation.

apply_filters( 'ridecab_admin_booking_email_recipient', string $recipient )

Accepts a comma-separated list and defaults to the WordPress admin email. Note that the “New Ride Booking (Admin)” email is not sent as a separate message: while it is enabled, these addresses are added as Bcc to the customer's confirmation. Disabling that email in WooCommerce → Settings → Emails stops the copy entirely, and this filter is then never consulted.

ridecab_booking_saved

Fires after a booking's status or driver assignment is saved from the admin screen, once the order meta has been written.

do_action( 'ridecab_booking_saved', int $booking_id )

The booking id is the WooCommerce order id. This is what moves a ride between driver calendars when an assignment changes. It does not fire when a booking is first created at checkout.

ridecab_booking_created

Both email classes listen for this action, but RideCab never fires it — the confirmation is triggered directly once the booking row exists. It is left in place so a site can send the confirmation from its own code:

do_action( 'ridecab_booking_created', $order );

Firing it for an order RideCab has already mailed sends a second copy, as the once-only guard is on RideCab's own path.

23. FAQ