Weekly Links Roundup – Calendar Plugins, Tour Booking, Maintenance Mode, SMTP

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Calendar plugins are a big and sometimes confusing topic – there are a lot of them. Some are free and some paid. How do you choose the best one for your particular job? This review of top calendar plugins for 2019 might help. It’s a little different because it includes plugins for appointment and rental bookings – not just the typical event calendar.

And speaking of bookings… my client is a tour guide in Peru and was looking for a plugin to handle tour bookings. That was harder to find than I thought, but I came up with two options that look promising, and that we’re going to try.  Check out WP Travel or WP Travel Engine. You can also use WooCommerce for this purpose.

Sometimes you may need to ‘close’ your site to do some maintenance or handle an emergency. Here’s a post on how to put your site into ‘maintenance mode,’ with or without using a plugin.

Finally… Not getting the expected notification emails from your WordPress site? That’s so irritating, isn’t it? The reason is most likely that the host server is not set up for PHP mail(), or it’s set up incorrectly, or it’s being flagged as spam by the receiving server because PHP mail() is not industry-standard and can lack proper authentication. The fix is to use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send those notifications instead. This post will show you how.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.