BA Hotel theme allows you to place additional content (widgets) into the next areas: Left sidebar, Right sidebar, Before Header panel, Header panel, Before Footer panel, Footer panel, Footer left panel, Footer middle left panel, Footer middle right panel, Footer right panel. Follow official WordPress Widgets documentation to find more details about widgets.

Below is an example of widgets settings from demo site.

BA Hotel theme uses standard WordPress menu system for navigation. If you are not familiar with using WordPress menus and its basic setup, please follow the user guide on the official WordPress Codex.

BA Hotel theme has one menu location called “Primary Menu”. Go to Appearance -> Menus, create new menu, assign this menu to a “Primary Menu” location and add pages that you want to show in the site header navigation.

You can also add different menus to any site widgets area, what you can see in the footer on demo site. To do this, first create new “Footer 1” menu (don’t assign it to menu location), then go to Appearance -> Widgets and add “Navigation Menu” widget to one of the footer panels.

Below is an example from demo site.

Next guide will help you to setup booking engine and room pages like on a BA Hotel demo site. Please note, that room (booking object) post type, service post type, FAQ post type, custom taxonomies, categories, ages, booking rules are created and managed by BA Book Everything plugin. All of them are needed to make room posts work and look like on a demo site. So this page contains needed description of all these items.

Before setup rooms you have to install and activate BA Book Everything plugin as described in Recommended Plugins section. You can find more details about setup booking rules, currencies, categories, custom taxonomies, prices and emails in the BA Book Everything documentation.

General Settings

At the beginning you have to configure booking engine from BA Settings menu. Most of the settings can be used with their default values. But some of them you may want to change:

• Room post slug and name – on General tab you can find default booking object post slug and name, created by BA Book Everything plugin. Change them to “room” and “Room” or to other names that you like to see on your site (as shown on the screenshot below)
• Add services to booking form – you should activate this option on General tab if you want to sell services with booking in “one click” inside booking form
• Currency – setup needed options for your currency on Currency tab
• Payments – if you activated BABE Payment pack add-on (bundled in theme) you should activate needed payment methods and add your PayPal/Stripe data on Payment tab
• Confirmation front-end messages – edit default confirmation messages on Confirmation tab
• Emails – BA Book Everything plugin creates nice html notification emails. Add your company logo image, header image, footer and credits text on Emails tab
• Google map – you should specify your Google API key, start Latitude and Longitude here to use “address-map” shortcode in the theme (you also can override lat/long data in shortcode params later)

Booking rules

After previous step you have “Rooms” admin menu (name is changed from “BA Book Everything”). Go to “Rooms” > “Booking rools” to create new rule “Hotel” with next options:

• Basic booking period – 1 night (hotels, apartments, hostels, etc.)
• Use Age categories for prices? – will not used for booking the whole room (object booking mode), but could be applied for booking beds (places booking mode). For hotel purposes you can leave it as “No”.
• Payment model – select from “Pay deposit amount”, “Pay full amount” or “Pay deposit or full amount (the customer will choose)”
• Deposit, % – will applied if “Pay deposit amount” or “Pay deposit or full amount (the customer will choose)” is selected
• Booking mode – set to “Object booking” for booking the whole room or to “Places booking” for booking beds (hostels)

You can create several booking rules with different Payment models if you want to get, for example, full payment for some rooms/properties and allow deposit payment for others.

Ages

Go to “Ages” menu and add needed ages, if you want use them in search form and booking details. Note, that “order” meta field is required by the plugin. With the smallest number will be the main age (usually – adult), others will be sorted by ASC.

Taxonomies

On demo site you can see Features section on the room page and in the room descriptions on search result. That is a custom taxonomy which is managed by BA Book Everything plugin. By default there is no any custom taxonomy in menu. Go to “Taxonomies” menu and add terms with needed taxonomies names. After updating the page, new taxonomies will appear in the menu below the “Taxonomies” menu and you can add terms to each of them.

For each term in custom taxonomy you can add icon image or icon class for one of three supported fonts: Linear icons (example – “lnr lnr-car”), Elegant font (example – “eleganticon icon_desktop”) and Fontawesome 5 (example – “fas fa-street-view”). BA Hotel theme is bundled with several icon images for demo purposes, which you can find in theme directory /ba-hotel/css/images/ and use on your site also.

Services

To add services to your rooms you should create them as described in Services documentation.

FAQ

To give more information for your customers you can add “Questions and Answers” section to each room post. That section contains selected posts of FAQ post type that you can create via “FAQ” > “add FAQ” menu (put question into the title field and answer into the content area).

Categories

Categories in BA Book Everything plugin is more than just a taxonomy. Categories term defines a template for booking object post (room post) with selected booking rule, availability rule, enabled/disabled taxes, “services” section, “FAQ” section, “step by step description” section, included taxonomies (see example taxonomy “Features” above), address field (not used in our case).
You must create at least one category before adding room posts. The screenshot below shows how it might look.

Room

Now we are ready to put all parts together in a room post as shown on screenshot below. Minimum requirements:

• Available from Date and to Date – must be specified
• Category – will not work if no categories were created at the previous step
• Prices – create at least one rate (add title, prices and press “Save new rate” button) before publish the post

BA Hotel theme comes with several plugins which will extend the theme basic functionality. The most important is BA Book Everything plugin. It’s free (hosted on official WordPress repository), required to create rooms and to make the most of the theme features.

The second required plugin is “BA Theme core“, which contains useful post types and shortcodes. BA Hotel theme also contains “BA Theme premium pack” with additional post types and shortcodes.

To accept payments you need to install “BABE Payment Pack” plugin, which is also included in theme files.

If you have no preferences, we recommend to use “Contact Form 7” plugin to build forms on site pages and “MailChimp for WordPress” plugin for subscriptions.

“Sassy Social Share” and “Social Icons” plugins will be handy for adding social sharing icons on pages and your social profiles links in the footer area.

Go to Appearance -> Install Plugins to install and activate plugins.

Your installable WordPress theme file is ba-hotel.zip.

You can install the theme in two different ways:

1. WordPress Administration Panels

Navigate to Appearance -> Themes page to access theme uploader screen, select “Add New” and upload ba-hotel.zip file.

2. FTP

Extract ba-hotel.zip file and upload the extracted ba-hotel folder to /wp-content/themes/ folder on your server. The WordPress codex contains instructions on how to do this here.

After uploading the theme, you have to activate it. Navigate to Appearance -> Themes page to activate the theme.

Updating

• Download the latest package and extract it
• Find “ba-hotel” folder inside the package
• Use FTP to overwrite current theme folder on your server with new one

Welcome to BA Hotel theme documentation.

If you are not familiar with using WordPress itself, please first visit and learn from Official WordPress Codex.

Documentation is related to BA Hotel theme and explains how to setup and use most of its specific options and features. If you are having an issue and can’t find the answer here, please contact us via contact form and we will try to answer as soon as possible.

Also, feel free to suggest any new features you may want in this theme and we will consider adding it for the next update(s).