Import Starter Content from the Demo

A new booking site is hard to picture when every screen is empty. Starter content adds the services, sample staff and pages from the Core Bookings demo to your own site, so you can see a working setup, edit it into yours, and remove whatever you don’t need in one step.

Starter content needs Core Bookings 1.1.1 or later. Nothing is added until you preview and confirm it.

Add Starter Content

1. Open Bookings → Settings → Import / Export (under Maintenance).
2. In Starter content, choose what to add:
   • Services, sample staff and their weekly hours are always included.
   • Draft pages with booking forms, a service directory, popup buttons and a customer dashboard.
   • Sample customers and appointments, past and upcoming, so the Overview, Appointments and Reports screens have something to show.
3. Click Preview starter content and read the list: staff, services, pages, how many appointments, and notes about your site.
4. Tick I reviewed this list and want to add these records, then click Import starter content.

You need booking-management and export permission, and an account that can create users. Adding pages also needs permission to edit pages.

What Gets Added

• Four sample staff: Alex Morgan, Priya Shah, Sam Lee and Maya Fernandes. Each is a WordPress account with the Subscriber role and an address ending in example.invalid. No email is sent, and nobody can sign in with these accounts until you set a password. Their weekly hours start at 9:00.
• Up to thirteen services, active straight away: Discovery Call (questions, rotating hosts), Project Review (needs approval), Coaching Sessions (three lengths, weekly repeats), WordPress Workshop and Morning Yoga (group sessions), Posture Check-in, Sports Massage (three lengths with their own prices, paid at the studio), Home Office Visit (guests), Quick Website Fix (gap-free times) and Partner Onboarding Call (unlisted).
• Module services: Team Planning Session needs the Teams and routing module. Website Audit Course and Community Meetup need Classes and events. The preview names any service it leaves out and the module to turn on.
• Draft pages: a Book online page with the service directory, one page per service with its booking form under it, Book in a popup, and My bookings with the customer dashboard. Class timetable and Meet the team are added when their modules are on.
• Sample appointments: about 24 appointments for ten fictional customers: completed visits, two no-shows and a cancellation over the past two weeks or so, and confirmed bookings over the following week.

Dates are built from the day you import, so upcoming appointments are always upcoming. Times use your site timezone; a site set to a UTC offset gets UTC, and the preview says so. Prices are sample amounts in your currency.

What Stays the Same

• Your existing services, staff, customers, appointments and settings are never changed.
• No email, SMS or calendar event is sent or created, for the import or for the sample appointments.
• Site settings such as the currency, timezone and customer dashboard page stay as they are. Point Settings → Customer accounts at the new My bookings page yourself if you want to use it.

Make It Yours

Edit services under Bookings → Services and staff under Bookings → Staff. Give a sample staff member a real email address and password, or replace them with your own team. Pages stay drafts until you publish them; each starts with a note that it is sample content, so remove that line before you publish.

Remove Starter Content

1. Open Bookings → Settings → Import / Export.
2. In Starter content, tick I want to remove the starter content and click Remove starter content.

Removal deletes the sample appointments (with their history and notes), the sample services, the four staff accounts and the sample customers, and moves the sample pages to the Trash. You need an account that can delete users.

A service that a real customer has booked since the import stays, along with the staff it lists, and the panel shows what was kept. Remove it again later, once those bookings are done or moved, to finish the job.

Deleting Core Bookings with Delete data on uninstall turned on removes the booking tables but not the sample staff accounts or pages. Remove starter content first.

Questions

Can I import it twice? No. Remove it first; then you can import it again.

Does it work on a site that already takes bookings? Yes. It only adds records, and the sample staff are new accounts with their own calendars, so their appointments never block your staff.

Can I add only the services? Yes. Leave pages and sample appointments unchecked.