Dear Amelia users,
Alexander here, the founder and CEO of Amelia.
Hi on behalf of all of our team!
We’ve been communicating with many of you personally via LinkedIn, our features voting system, and on WordCamps and events, and I am happy to see that our userbase is steadily growing.
As we want to keep in touch with you (which is getting harder to do personally), we are looking for more “broadcast” channels to communicate, build community, and hear your feedback.
First and foremost – thank you for being with us!
You are the driving force for us to build Amelia and nothing would be possible without you – we appreciate every user and the trust you place in us.
In this post, I would like to look back at our progress. I know it’s already spring and yearly roundups come earlier, but I believe you’ll find this interesting and useful.
I’ll go through all the improvements, new developments, and achievements we’ve made together, as well as answer some concerns I’ve regularly encountered in individual conversations with some of you.
And after that, we’ll give you a glimpse of what’s ahead of us.
While some found 2024 to be a bit slower in terms of new features (and, indeed, new “blockbuster” functionalities were not released every few weeks), I actually have a very good feeling about it in retrospect. The team worked hard, delivered a lot of long-requested features, and set the foundations for strong future scaling that you’ll experience this year.
New Features in 2024
First of all, let’s start by going through some of the most-loved updates of 2024.
In general, we focused on refining Amelia, enhancing the user experience, and adding new features—all based on your feedback and needs.
📅 iCal synchronization for seamless scheduling
iCal synchronization makes managing multiple calendars easy. Keep your bookings up to date across platforms and avoid double bookings and missed appointments.
✔ Automatically sync bookings between Amelia and external calendars
✔ Stay updated on schedule changes in real time
✔ Reduce conflicts and improve time management
🚫 Full control over who can book with you
We understand the importance of maintaining a smooth booking experience. Our customer-blocking feature allows you to prevent specific customers from making future bookings.
✔ Stop repeat no-shows and difficult clients
✔ Free up valuable time by minimizing missed appointments
✔ Increase completed bookings and improve business performance
📜 Hassle-free payments and invoicing
Forget about manual invoicing! With our Automated Invoices feature, you can generate instant invoices for every booking, saving you time and effort.
✔ Automatically create and send invoices after each booking
✔ Keep records organized for accounting and compliance
✔ Easily download and share invoices with customers
💰Automated tax calculations
Managing taxes doesn’t have to be that hard. With our Tax Feature, businesses can automatically calculate and apply taxes to services and events. This ensures compliance with tax regulations and simplifies your bookkeeping.
✔ Automatically calculate and apply taxes for services and events
✔ Streamline tax management without relying on external plugins
✔ Fully integrated with the Invoice feature for seamless invoicing
Available in Standard, Pro, and Elite licenses.
⏳ Smarter event management with event waiting lists
Fully booked events? No problem! The new Waiting List feature lets customers hold a spot until a space opens up. This means better attendance and a smoother booking experience.
✔ Add customers to a waiting list for sold-out events
✔ Fill last-minute cancellations with ease
✔ Improve customer satisfaction and event attendance
Available in Pro and Elite licenses.
💳 More ways to accept payments
We expanded our payment options to give you and your customers more flexibility. Now, you can seamlessly accept payments through Stripe Connect and Square.
✔ Accept payments from more customers worldwide
✔ Secure and easy-to-use integrations
✔ Faster transactions for a smoother checkout experience
✔ Distribute payments to employees via Stripe Connect
🔗 WP Fusion integration for seamless sync
Seamlessly sync your Amelia bookings with over 50 CRMs and marketing tools. With WP Fusion, automation is easier than ever—apply tags based on booked services and keep your workflows running smoothly.
✔ Sync appointments with top CRMs and marketing platforms
✔ Automate workflows with service-based tagging
✔ Save time and streamline customer management
More Intuitive User Experience and Interface Enhancements
We didn’t just focus on new features—we also made Amelia easier and more enjoyable to use. Some parts of the interface were designed back in 2018, and after gathering tons of feedback, we knew it was time for a refresh.
While these updates may not introduce brand-new functionalities, they make navigation smoother, booking simpler, and customization more flexible.
Redesigned Event Calendar 2.0: Our new Event Calendar offers a more streamlined booking experience with an improved UI/UX. It’s now cleaner, easier to navigate, and makes booking events easy.
Redesigned Customer Panel 2.0: Managing appointments and events is now effortless. The new Customer Panel makes it simple to update profiles, check bookings, and make changes—all with a fresh, more intuitive design.
Enhanced Customization Options: You asked for more flexibility, and we delivered. All booking forms now feature improved customization options. You can now adjust custom field widths in your booking forms, choosing between full-width (1/1) and half-width (1/2) layouts. This makes forms look cleaner and fit your needs better.
These updates are all about making Amelia work better for you—smoother, faster, and more user-friendly.
Is it actually a “redesign”, or something greater?
We’ve been calling our recent updates a “redesign,” but that doesn’t fully capture what’s really happening.
This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint—we’ve completely reworked the front-end logic of our booking forms in a new framework.
This process (and its effects) goes well beyond just aesthetic changes; it involves deep structural modifications that enhance performance, maintainability, and scalability. Developers call such a re-adjustment of the codebase (while keeping existing functionalities) refactoring:
“Refactor: restructure (the source code of an application or piece of software) so as to improve operation without altering functionality”
So why does this matter? Our old codebase has been evolving since 2017-2018, and by refactoring it, we’ve not only improved the current functionalities but also paved the way for more flexible future upgrades and the seamless integration of additional features.
While refactoring is never particularly exciting–especially, on the user’s side—as it seems as if nothing is going on, it makes sure the codebase is cleaner, more stable, and scalable, opening opportunities for future functionality.
Some Other Features and UX/UI Improvements
Some features speak for themselves, but the smaller tweaks (often unnoticed at first) can make a huge difference in how it feels to actually use Amelia. These improvements help streamline interactions, save time on daily tasks, and make everything more intuitive for both business owners and customers.
Here are just a few of the refinements we’ve recently added:
Enhancements in customer and employee experience
The small changes mostly influenced processes of management appointments, clients, and services:
📞 Enhanced Data Validation: If an email isn’t provided, the system now verifies phone numbers to keep customer records accurate.
🔎Faster Customer Search: We’ve introduced functionality that allows you to look up customers by phone number for quicker access and better efficiency.
🏢 Employee Filtering by Multiple Locations: Managers can now filter employees by multiple locations, so staff management across different sites is much easier.
💰Improved Employee Price Display Logic: Custom employee prices are shown when the service price is set to 0, ensuring the employee’s price is displayed instead.
📲Enhanced WhatsApp Notifications: We’ve improved our WhatsApp notification templates to include location details in the header, providing clearer information to recipients and enhancing communication effectiveness.
🗂️ Easier Service Selection: You can now choose to display service categories first in the backend, which makes navigation more efficient.
Performance & optimization
To ensure a faster and more reliable experience, we’ve made significant backend optimizations:
- Faster event queries for improved data retrieval.
- Enhanced API logic for smoother appointment handling and package bookings.
- Improved WooCommerce integration for more reliable bookings and payments.
- Optimized Packages page for a more seamless booking experience.
- Enhanced placeholder service for better coupon, custom field, and customer data retrieval.
Booking & appointment enhancements
The following improvements are a bit technical, but will be of interest to developers that extend Amelia:
- Improved the Add Appointment API to allow bulk appointment creation in one request.
- Introduced a new API call for retrieving available package slots.
- Improved the logic for assigning coupons to new services, events, and packages when “All” is selected. Enabled the option to display “All” services and packages on the Catalog Booking Form 2.0.
- Added a new property isPackageAppointment to indicate whether an appointment is part of a package.
- Improved logic to allow adding new customers to group bookings while creating an appointment. Allowed custom settings parameters for integrations in the Get Time Slots API call.
- Implemented a sorting option for services within packages to improve organization.
- Improved the logic for controlling the total number of people in a single booking.
- Implemented a new API parameter to format appointments.
- Improved API logic for updating and retrieving package purchases.
Payment & financial improvements
Again, largely technical improvements:
- Enhanced Stripe integration by improving customer connections and adding address fields.
- Enabled Onsite and WooCommerce payments, expanding payment options.
- Introduced a placeholder %payment_due_amount% to dynamically display the due amount.
- Implemented post-booking action improvements after WooCommerce redirects.
- Improved connection between WordPress users and Amelia customers/employees for better user management.
Calendar & event enhancements
- Added unique status-based CSS classes to the Event Calendar 2.0 form for better customization.
- Increased the event description length limit for more detailed event information.
- Added ‘Fifth’ as a recurrence option for monthly recurring events.
- Improved location address formatting in ICS files for better calendar integration.
- Added an option to delete the date filter on backend pages for more flexible filtering.
- Added the option to preselect location in shortcodes for the Event List 2.0 form.
User interface & customization
- Added an option on the Customize page to remove scrolling from the Catalog 2.0 booking form.
- Provided the ability to remove service and category images for a cleaner UI.
- Allowed preselection of Amelia shortcodes via URL query parameters.
- Added an option to enable or disable field search on the Step-by-Step form’s info step.
- Introduced category improvements, allowing images, colors, and customization for better organization.
- Added a sorting option for packages based on validation date in Customer Panel 2.0.
Notifications & communication
- Implemented automated notifications for package bookings assigned to a single employee.
- Added an option to enable Google Meet per event and service for better virtual meeting management.
- Improved event tracking logic for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to enhance reporting accuracy.
Security & data management
- Added the option to insert an IPLocate API key to support up to 1,000 API requests per day for auto-locating phone country codes.
- Improved export options by adding appointment duration and including event date/time in file names.
- Added a new customer filter option based on the No-Show tag for better tracking of unreliable customers.
Updates You Might Have Missed
As I’ve already mentioned, we’ve been working quite hard on the improvements and updates. However, some updates didn’t get the spotlight they deserved, which was probably an oversight, as we saw that many of you missed those.
So, let’s take a closer look at a few key enhancements you may have missed:
📊Customer Activity Tracking: Makes booking management and service tracking easier as you can now see all appointments and events in one place for each customer.
📲 Optimized SMS Message Handling: Our SMS message handling has been improved, leading to better message delivery and fewer failed texts due to incorrect phone formats or other issues.
⚡ Performance Enhancements: We’ve implemented performance enhancements across the board. The result? Faster load times, a smoother experience, and a more reliable plugin.
🔑Password Synchronization: When creating or updating an employee in Amelia, if a password is provided and the “Create new” option is selected for the WordPress user, that password syncs automatically for easier user management and enhanced security.
🔄Synchronized Logout: Logging out from WordPress also logs you out of the customer panel (and vice versa), which makes the transition between accounts seamless.
👥 Synchronized User Data: Updates to names, emails, and passwords in Amelia now reflect in WordPress (and vice versa), ensuring everything stays consistent.
Our Brief but Impactful Community Engagements
In 2024, the Amelia, wpDataTables, and Trafft teams had the privilege of participating in several WordPress events worldwide, each with its own unique experiences, insights, and opportunities to connect with the wonderful WordPress community.
WordCamp Asia – Taipei, Taiwan (March 2024)
In March 2024, we made our way to WordCamp Asia in Taipei, Taiwan, where we participated in the Contributor Day, and met with the Core team members, the Plugin Reviews team, organizers, and lots of WordPress professionals from both the region and beyond.
It was (as every WordCamp is) quite an insightful experience. We’ve learned a lot about where WordPress is heading with Full Site Editing, and performance and security optimization best practices. These takeaways help us shape our future plans for Amelia accordingly.
WordCamp Europe – Torino, Italy (June 2024)
In June, we set up our booth at WordCamp Europe in Torino, Italy, where we had a wonderful time meeting agencies, fellow developers, product companies, and, of course, many of you—our wonderful users (hopefully you were there and said hi to us as well)!
We ran a giveaway and a tournament on Arkanoid, which Nuno totally crushed!
Also, later during the summer we ran a competition and voted on the best-designed booking website built with Amelia.
We were beyond excited to see all the different, beautiful, functional, and helpful websites you’re building with Amelia! You can still check out the stunning booking forms on our showcase page.
And don’t worry—we may run it again this year, so stay tuned!
The 2025 Roadmap: What’s on the Horizon for Amelia
Now that we’ve looked back at 2024, let’s dive into what’s ahead in 2025—the part, I’m sure, everyone’s most excited about.
Here’s what we’re working on and what you can expect from Amelia in the year ahead.
Final front-end redesign release
After a massive effort, we did it! The redesign (and refactoring) was a HUGE project of its own, and now that we finished this cycle in February 2025, we can finally celebrate the release of the last redesigned form—Employee Panel.
Together with the panel comes a new option that many of you requested—customer creation. This means that the employees can now create new customers directly from the panel.
This update also means we’re saying goodbye to old form blocks—but don’t worry, if your website still uses them, any manually added shortcodes or forms will continue to work as usual.
Our goal is to ensure a seamless transition while giving you a refreshed, more intuitive experience. We also want to make sure that all new projects leverage the full power of new booking forms, so if you haven’t already explored the upgraded forms, now’s the time to dive in and take full advantage of all the new features!
WCAG compliance
2025 is a huge year for web accessibility for many of us in the websites industry – Amelia is no exception, and we’re working hard on it.
We will be implementing significant improvements to achieve WCAG compliance, making our platform more accessible and user-friendly for all.
Every user deserves a great experience, and these enhancements will reflect our dedication to that mission.
Exciting New Features for Appointment and Event Booking
We’re enhancing your booking experience with a set of powerful features designed to simplify workflows and increase customization.
Here’s what we did in the first few months of 2025 and what’s coming in the near future:
- Microsoft Teams Integration: Seamlessly schedule and manage appointments directly from within Microsoft Teams.
- Quick Customer Addition: Add customers directly from the panel, simplifying the booking process and saving time.
- Expanded Payment Options: We’re integrating Google Pay and Apple Pay via Stripe to offer more flexible payment methods during checkout.
- Google and Facebook Customer Login: Effortless login with Google and Facebook – faster access and easy autofill for your personal details!
- Improved Step-by-Step Form: We’re enhancing the user interface to display services, categories, locations, and more as cards, making the selection process smoother and more intuitive. This update will also serve as a solid foundation for a future feature that allows reordering steps in the booking process.
- Conditional Pricing: More flexibility in customizing service pricing to meet your unique needs.
- Customer Custom Fields: Customer Custom Fields stay linked to each customer, while Booking Custom Fields apply to each individual booking.
While exciting new features are on the way—and some still remain in the backlog—we continuously strive to strike a balance between introducing new functionality and improving what’s already there.
Focus on reliability and performance
Reliability is at the heart of everything we do. In 2025, we’re putting a big focus on performance optimization – again, something not flashy and visible on the surface, but making a huge impact on your daily experience with Amelia.
We’ll be optimizing Amelia functions for faster load times, allowing you to focus on what matters most—your work.
Expect a faster, smoother experience across all functionalities.
From customer support to customer success
In 2024, we began transforming our approach to customer support, and this year, we’re prioritizing more open communication with our customers.
This blog post is one of the steps in this direction, and it’s not going to be a one-off thing.
We believe in transparency, which is why we’re excited to introduce a public roadmap on our blog.
This will allow you to see our upcoming features and improvements, keeping you informed and engaged in our journey.
Additionally, we’re dedicated to fostering customer success by actively reaching out to our translator users as we roll out updates.
This initiative will help us include new strings with each release, ensuring a smoother experience for everyone. We encourage volunteers to contact us (see below) if they’re interested in being part of this process.
What We’re Currently Working On: The Next Big Steps for Amelia
As a sign of transparency, we want to share what we’re currently focusing on and what you can look forward to by the end of the year:
💡Back-end revamp: A transformative update for Amelia
We’ve been sitting on some BIG news, and now the time has finally come to share it with you!
Later this year, we’ll be rolling out revamps of Amelia’s admin dashboard design—a transformative change that will significantly modernize and improve your Amelia experience.
This is more than just a redesign; it’s a complete reimagining of how you manage your appointments and events within Amelia.
But…why?
As we have many years of experience in developing web systems, we know one thing for sure: whenever you release a large update of an interface (usually a result of many months of work, team effort, late night work – as is definitely the case now), for a significant percentage of users first reaction isn’t positive.
When we make major updates like this, we anticipate some questions from you, such as:
- Why change something that works fine?
- Why should our end customers change their habits?
- What was wrong with the old version? We liked it better…
We hear you, and we’d like to try to address those concerns upfront.
Amelia 1.0 was developed in 2017 and released back in 2018, with the knowledge and understanding we had back then about the interfaces, functionalities, code, components, and elements we would need.
As time has proven, we did many things right. But we couldn’t anticipate all the features in advance, and we’ve developed hundreds of features since the first version. This led to many of the back-end screens and sections being overloaded (e.g., the service settings became a sidebar cluttered with tabs, where every tab has a long screen full of interface components, and the appointment editing from the backend isn’t optimal).
As UX is one of our core focus areas, a reorganization was a long-pending task. Now that we’re in a position to do it right, our goal is simple:
- To make Amelia easy and intuitive for users who need basic functionality.
- To ensure that advanced users have everything they need at their fingertips.
Also, interfaces and UI components evolved in recent years and we want to provide the benefits of this evolution to Amelia users.
A better user experience means less time spent on daily operations and more focus on the work that matters most. For business owners and managers who spend a significant part of their week in Amelia, this will be a game-changer.
What you can expect
Don’t worry, there’ll be no sudden, unannounced, or breaking changes. Everything you’re used to will stay there and you’ll easily find it. And we’ll make sure to update the docs and videos accordingly. In addition, all the redesign steps will undergo alpha/beta testing with a focus group of users.
📝 Wanna join the alpha version?
We’ll be opening up sign-ups for the alpha version of the new Amelia later this summer. You can already submit your application now to get early access to all the exciting new features. In return, we’d love your feedback to help shape the final release. Stay tuned for more details soon!
What’s coming in the new Amelia?
Our upcoming redesign will focus on performance, usability, and innovation to ensure Amelia remains the leading solution for appointment and event management.
Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect:
A redesigned admin dashboard
We’re giving the backend a complete overhaul to create a modern, intuitive, and user-friendly interface.
Key functionalities will be reorganized to make workflows smoother, saving you time and effort.
The new design will follow cutting-edge UI/UX principles, delivering a clean, organized, and visually appealing experience.
A new programming language for enhanced performance
To boost performance, we’re introducing a new programming language for the backend.
This change will improve load times, responsiveness, and scalability, ensuring a faster and more efficient experience.
New features and options
Expect a host of new tools, customization options, and advanced features designed to expand what you can achieve with Amelia.
We’re focused on simplifying plugin usage while providing you with powerful options that make the platform more flexible and efficient.
Refactoring and optimization
Behind the scenes, we’re implementing extensive code refactoring and optimization to enhance platform speed, stability, and scalability.
These improvements will ensure long-term reliability and ensure Amelia stays ahead of the curve.
Simplified workflows and assistance
We’re adding more helpful guides and assistance tools to ensure that both beginners and experts can easily navigate the platform.
Managing tasks will be faster, simpler, and more intuitive than ever before.
Regular Questions and Concerns from Our Users
Why [feature X] was not released yet, we’ve submitted it months ago/it’s one of the most-voted features!
First of all, thank you for contributing to Amelia’s development with ideas, we truly appreciate that and that’s why we have the feature voting system in the first place.
Our roadmap relies on your suggestions and votes a lot. We are the developers, but the end value (automating appointments) is happening on your side and we aim to support you. And, as time goes by, we are delivering the most popular requests.
But feature votes are not the only input for the roadmap. Amelia became a very large platform, and it has lots of components, moving parts, and stakeholders.
Often, before one feature can be developed, there is some prerequisite that is blocking it from being kicked off. For instance, the code needed refactoring, the form was pending redesign so that the change wouldn’t have to be done twice.
In the past, we’ve made the mistake of rushing to develop features, just to have as many as we can as soon as possible. This usually works more or less fine in the early stages of any product. Later, as the codebase and userbase grow, the rush inevitably leads to:
- Complicated interfaces
- Bugs and usability issues
- Performance issues
- Bad structure
- “Technical debt” – the code piles up, becomes “fragile” and “viscous” and it’s getting impossible to add things to it without breaking other things.
You’ve probably noticed similar situations with some young products. At first, they have a fast feature race, followed by a decline in quality.
So, to answer the question – we will get there. Maybe not as fast as all of us would love to, but we will—and when we do, we’ll make sure it’s done right.
So, while we may not release a new feature every month, we choose quality over rushed development. Because the alternative, like having constant bugs, broken appointments, and failed notifications, is not an option.
Why is the development so slow?
I’ll copy my response to this question that I provided elsewhere with very minor tweaks. I hope that, together with the context of this post and the previous answer, it will provide better insights:
“I understand that looking from the side the development might seem not exactly on the speedy side.
We aren’t a large team yet (have plans to get there), and with an ecosystem of 80.000+ website owners trusting their critical business processes on Amelia, each with a different usage scenario, with 100-200 support requests coming in on a daily basis, many of which require developers attention, with 4-5 simultaneous development initiatives constantly in progress (when “this feature” that one needs is not there, it seems that nothing’s happening), with libraries and dependencies requiring updates, and with a professional process (design, dev, QA) in place, time goes a little bit..differently when compared to users standpoint. 🙂
If we rush and publish new features just for the marketing effect and to tick off those boxes, the first tradeoffs that many would notice would be quality, usability, and long-term stability. Nobody would care that those features were published within a short time frame if their business process suffers. There are many examples in the WP world, unfortunately”
And I’ll just add two more points to that:
- Amelia as a platform now has lots of routes/scenarios/modules, and some things, seemingly small from the outside, require a lot of thorough planning. For example, if we are adding just a small tweak to the booking process, we need to think through, design, code, and test:
- How it works with appointment booking;
- How it works with group booking;
- How it works with recurring bookings, different time zones, calendar integrations for different integrations;
- How it works with custom notifications;
- How it works with packages;
- How it works with multilingual websites;
- How it works with the integrations, customizations, code extensions;
- Etc.
- If you look at really large, well-known, long-existing plugins, you’ll see it’s not uncommon for them to also have a couple of feature releases per year though they do have very hard-working dedicated dev teams.
Having said all of the above, development and production efficiency remain our primary focus, and we are committed to releasing new features regularly.
Your competitors have [feature X] and you don’t have it still!
We do strive to be the niche-leading solution for bookings in the WordPress industry. To achieve that, we are focusing on making Amelia the best tool we can at the current moment, and I strongly believe that chasing competitors or reacting to their every move sets the wrong focus Competing for the sake of competition can lead to rushed decisions, misguided priorities, and assumptions that competitors have made the right choices.
We are focused on Amelia and you, our users, and your needs, so please, do share the features/tasks that YOU need and we’ll incorporate those in our roadmap.
Are you abandoning Amelia and focusing only on Trafft now?
Absolutely not! Amelia remains a top priority, as you can see from everything we’re working on. 🙂
Amelia and Trafft are developed by separate teams. In fact, they benefit from each other by sharing insights and knowledge. Colleagues from Trafft wrote a detailed post about it over a year ago.
We Need Your Help!
As we said, we do rely on user feedback, and we monitor it carefully. Unfortunately, with limited time and resources, we can’t always engage across every platform as much as we’d like.
Only recently did we realize how lucky we are to have such an amazing community of Amelia users, and we want to embrace and grow it further!
We would like to make our Discord, Nolt, Facebook (and perhaps other platforms) communities more engaging, which requires more hands on deck.
That’s why we’re looking for volunteers to help make the Amelia community even better:
- Community Moderators: Help engage users, manage discussions, and keep our communities thriving. As moderators, you’d get more direct contact with us, which should help us establish better communication loops.
- Translators: Assist in translating Amelia into your language.
- Beta Testers: Get early access to new features and provide valuable feedback.
- Agencies: Share insights on your use cases to help us get a better understanding of your needs and use cases, so we can prepare better partnership opportunities.
If you believe you could help, please fill in this Google Form, and we’ll reach out to you.
A Closing Note from Our Team
Thank you for reading this post—we know it was a long one, but we truly hope you found it valuable.
We’re a small yet very dedicated team working mostly from Serbia. Here’s a glimpse of our team in 2024, after one of our planning meetings:
At the heart of everything we do is the belief that behind every plugin, form, and line of code, there are real people—both on your side and ours. We love to meet our users as this human connection fuels our motivation and drives us forward. We hope this channel will, at least to some extent, create a similar connection for you.
Nothing excites us more than seeing happy customers, and we are on a mission to make you happy (at least within the context of bookings for WordPress 🙂).
We genuinely appreciate your support and feedback as we strive to create a platform that meets your needs. It’s important to us that you understand we’re here for you, aiming to build a community that values quality and usability. Thank you for being part of our journey!