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Hello Andrew,
Thanks for your message. We understand that you would like to create the pages of your rooms manually, but you should not use Shortcodes on pages that already generate contents.
The use of the Shortcodes is recommended to have complete pages generated by Vik Booking, comprehensive of texts, descriptions, photos, availability calendars and booking form. As you said, if you were to use such Shortcodes of type “Room Details” on a page of your website that is already describing your room, then you would end up having duplicate contents. In this case, if you like to use Shortcodes, the only solution available is to hide the contents generated by the Shortcode of Vik Booking via CSS. Every section generated by Vik Booking will wrapped inside a specific element with a precise class attribute, and by using the apposite custom CSS code for your Theme (or the apposite CSS file of Vik Booking for customization), you should simply hide those contents with a proper display: none; style.
Otherwise, another alternative solution compatible with any page-builder plugin, is to rather include a widget of Vik Booking inside your page. In this case, the widget “Search Form” would be perfect in your page that describes the room. Every widget comes with specific settings, and you could use the one to force the booking over that specific room-id by using the apposite drop down menu in the widget’s settings.
Shortcodes are not meant to display contents in a modular way. Shortcodes will simply render complete pages, and they are useful to build dynamic contents by reading the settings of the wp-admin section of Vik Booking. This means that creating a “Rooms List” page statically is not recommended. You should rather use the apposite Shortcode of Vik Booking that will render that page for you with the proper navigation links.
Regarding the Channel Manager: only availability, rates, restrictions, bookings and guest reviews are synced automatically. The Channel Manager will not transmit any description text to the OTAs. You will rather have a dedicated interface to manage the contents on each OTA (when the so called Content/Listing APIs are supported, so this changes from channel to channel).
We hope this helps!
The VikWP Team
Hello, Thanks for the fast reply!
OK widgets is a new one, I looked at the VIK widget loader, and it all seemed related to your themes?
I use Divi Theme builder, if the widgets work with it that would be brilliant!!
Andrew
PS I am sure I read on eJ4 that some of the OTA’s Vik feeds them the images and descriptions