Contents
Free vs Pro - Plugixa Car Parking
The free edition is a complete booking system, not a trial. Customers can book, you can manage bookings, locations, prices and forms, and nothing in it is time-limited or switched off.
Pro is the same plugin plus a pro/ directory. Whether a feature exists on
a site is decided by whether its code is there, never by a licence check.
Price
| Licence | Price |
|---|---|
| Pro, single site | €39 a year |
| Pro, unlimited sites | €59 a year |
Pro is sold through Freemius, with a 7-day trial that does not ask for a payment method.
Booking on your site
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Step-by-step booking form, placed with a shortcode or a block | yes | yes |
| Live availability and a price worked out on the server | yes | yes |
| Several booking forms, each with its own steps, fields, colour and locations | yes | yes |
| Your own fields on the booking form | yes | yes |
| Coupon codes, percentage or fixed | yes | yes |
| Booking summary page with an invoice and a Print button | yes | yes |
| Customer account page: find a booking and cancel it | yes | yes |
| Customers move a booking to other dates themselves | - | yes |
| Extras a customer can add to a booking | - | yes |
| Picking a numbered space | - | yes |
| Map of your locations, with a shortcode | - | yes |
| Dark mode that follows the visitor’s device, and right-to-left languages | yes | yes |
Pricing
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Prices per minute, hour, day, week and month for each space type | yes | yes |
| A one-off fee per space type | yes | yes |
| Different prices at one location | yes | yes |
| Pricing rules by date, weekday, arrival time, length of stay, location, space type and customer group | - | yes |
| Customer groups | - | yes |
| Tax rates, percentage or fixed, with compound rates | - | yes |
| Deposits: a percentage paid online, the rest on arrival | - | yes |
Payments
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Pay on arrival, with your own instructions | yes | yes |
| Payments ledger: record a payment, record a refund | yes | yes |
| Card payments through Stripe Checkout | - | yes |
| PayPal payments | - | yes |
| PDF invoice to download, attached to customer emails | - | yes |
Messages
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Booking received email to the customer | yes | yes |
| New booking notice to you | yes | yes |
| Payment received email to the customer | yes | yes |
| Message log | yes | yes |
| Text messages through Twilio or Vonage | - | yes |
| Telegram notices to a chat | - | yes |
| Reminder before arrival | - | yes |
| Daily report by email | - | yes |
Managing the business
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Any number of locations, with opening hours, closures and special days | yes | yes |
| Space types with icon, colour, size and features | yes | yes |
| Dashboard with the last 30 days | yes | yes |
| Bookings list with search, filters, sorting and mass actions | yes | yes |
| Taking a booking in the admin, priced and checked like one from the site | yes | yes |
| Calendar by month, week and day, with occupancy | yes | yes |
| CSV export of bookings | yes | yes |
| Trash with restore, on every list | yes | yes |
| Pending bookings that expire and free their space | yes | yes |
| Dark mode in the admin app | - | yes |
For developers
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
REST API under plugixa-car-parking/v1 |
yes | yes |
| Actions and filters | yes | yes |
| Six capabilities to grant with a role editor | yes | yes |
| REST routes for extras, tax rates, pricing rules, customer groups, reschedule and the PDF invoice | - | yes |
The Pro pages are Assigned spaces, Extras, Tax rates, Pricing rules, Customer groups, Deposits, Stripe, PayPal, Invoices, Reschedule, SMS and Telegram, Reminders and reports and Map.
How the two editions differ
At start-up the plugin looks for feature modules in two places:
includes/Modules/<Name>/Module.php every edition
pro/includes/Modules/<Name>/Module.php Pro only
The free download does not contain the pro/ directory at all, so the second
search finds nothing and the Pro modules are never created. That one fact has
several visible consequences.
- There is no licence check on features. No code asks whether a licence is
valid before running a Pro feature. If
pro/is on disk, its features run. - Pro routes do not exist in free. A request to
/booking-extras,/tax-rates,/pricing-rulesor/customer-groupson a free site returns WordPress’s ordinary 404 for an unknown route, not a “please upgrade” refusal. - Pro screens are not in the free admin app. There are no greyed-out menu entries and no locked pages.
- Pro tables are not created in free. The five Pro tables are created when the Pro modules first load.
- The Pro engines are not loaded. Extras, tax, pricing rules and deposits are listeners on the plugin’s own pricing filters. In free nothing is attached, so a booking costs the space type’s price less any coupon.
- The Pro shortcode is not registered. On a free site
[plugixa_car_parking_map]prints as plain text.
Licensing, updates and the account pages are handled by the Freemius SDK. See Privacy and uninstall for what it sends and when.
Moving between editions
From free to Pro
Pro installs as a second copy of the plugin beside the free one. Activate the Pro copy from the Plugins screen and the free copy is deactivated for you. Both copies use the same tables and settings, so there is nothing to migrate. On its first load the Pro copy notices that the set of modules on disk has changed and creates the Pro tables by itself.
If both copies end up active, which can happen when the Pro copy is activated from WP-CLI or a hosting panel, only one runs and a notice says so: “Two copies of Plugixa Car Parking are active. Only one can run”. Deactivate the copy you no longer need. Your bookings are shared and stay as they are.
Deleting the copy you no longer need is safe. Deleting keeps the data by default, and even with the erase switch on, nothing is erased while another copy is installed. See Privacy and uninstall.
From Pro back to free
Nothing is deleted. What changes:
| Pro data | What happens without Pro |
|---|---|
| Extras | Kept in the database. The screen and the add-ons in the booking form are gone. Existing bookings keep their extra lines and totals. |
| Tax rates | Kept. No tax is added to new bookings. Existing bookings keep their tax. |
| Pricing rules | Kept, but nothing applies them. New bookings use the base price. |
| Customer groups | Kept and unused. |
| Deposits | The location keeps its deposit settings, with no panel to edit them. New bookings are paid in full. Deposits already taken stay recorded. |
| Numbered spaces | A location set to By numbered space is counted as a pool again, from the rows of its Spaces panel. It stays bookable. |
| Stripe and PayPal | The keys stay stored, encrypted. Only Pay on arrival is offered. Payments already recorded stay in the ledger. |
| Text messages, Telegram, reminders, reports | The settings stay stored. Nothing is sent. |
| Map | The API key stays stored. The shortcode prints as plain text. |
| Existing bookings | Unchanged, including totals that rules, tax or extras adjusted. |
Reinstall Pro and everything above is live again.
Where readme and code differ
The plugin’s readme lists features in general terms. Where it and this documentation disagree, this documentation describes what version 1.0.0 does. In particular:
- The readme says there is no trial. The Pro licence is offered with a 7-day trial. The free edition has no trial because it has no expiry.
- The readme lists “hourly time-slot inventory” in the add-on. The hourly counting mode of version 1.0.0 counts spaces exactly as the standard mode does. Hourly parking is a billing unit, and it works in the free edition.
- The readme lists “numbered/assigned spaces”. The counting mode and the customer’s space picker exist, but version 1.0.0 has no admin screen for marking a space as numbered. See Assigned spaces.
- The readme lists “customer-group pricing”. A group has no price of its own: it is a condition of a pricing rule.
- The readme lists “deposits and partial payments”. There is one percentage deposit per location, offered with an online payment method.
- The readme calls the map a “location finder”. It is a map of markers, without a search.
See Troubleshooting.