Subscriptions, Memberships and Bookings

According to the product page, Subscriptions lets customers pay weekly, monthly or annually; each product can be one-time, a subscription or both; it supports free trials, sign-up fees, discounts, downloadable products on subscription and gifting; renewals are automatic through more than 25 payment gateways (named examples: WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal and PayPal Braintree) or manual through any WooCommerce gateway with automatic invoices; failed payments are retried with customer emails; billing dates can be aligned with a first payment that is full, on the next billing date or prorated; several subscriptions can be combined into one order and payment; and customers upgrade, downgrade, suspend, cancel and change their address or payment method from My Account. A Subscriptions Health Check is part of the tooling. Store managers edit subscriptions in WordPress admin.

For Pocket Coffee this is the "coffee club" in its recurring form: a monthly 250 g bag at 8.90 EUR (a variable subscription product with the origin as attribute), with a sign-up fee for the starter kit, free shipping in Spain from 40 EUR (a shipping rule, not a subscription feature) and the Coffee Club discount carried on the recurring total. The extension was not installed here, so the subscription is described, not run.

The function reference documents these methods of WC_Subscription; the free-standing helpers such as wcs_create_subscription() and wcs_get_subscription() exist but are not signed on that page, so check the plugin source before relying on their arguments.

Source: WooCommerce Subscriptions docs: function and property reference

The action reference lists more than 250 hooks in total; the ones a membership or fulfilment integration needs are these.

Source: WooCommerce Subscriptions docs: action reference

Useful filters are woocommerce_subscriptions_product_price_string (the price text of a product), woocommerce_subscription_price_string (the text of cart and order totals), woocommerce_subscription_periods, woocommerce_subscription_period_interval_strings and woocommerce_subscription_lengths (restrict periods, intervals and lengths, which is the supported way to offer a custom interval), woocommerce_subscriptions_product_first_renewal_payment_time (the first renewal timestamp, for aligned billing dates), woocommerce_is_subscription, wcs_user_has_subscription, wcs_get_users_subscriptions, wcs_view_subscription_actions, wcs_renewal_order_created and wcs_renewal_order_meta_query, wcs_can_user_resubscribe_to_subscription, wcs_switch_proration_extra_to_pay (since 8.8.0) and woocommerce_subscription_settings.

Source: WooCommerce Subscriptions docs: filter reference

A documented gateway interface lets a payment gateway process renewals (woocommerce_scheduled_subscription_payment_{$gateway_id}); gateways that do not declare the recurring features fall back to manual renewals, where the customer pays an invoice. The integration guide for gateway authors is linked in the references.

When the Coffee Club is a subscription instead of a one-off annual pass, the grant and the revoke hang off the status hooks rather than off the order. The next sketch is derived from the documented hook names; it was not run because the extension was not available. It keeps access during pending-cancel (the customer has paid for the term) and removes it when the subscription goes on hold, is cancelled or expires. Subscriptions also changes the user’s role itself and announces it with woocommerce_subscriptions_updated_users_role, so a rule that only reads the role needs no code at all.

Source: WooCommerce Subscriptions docs: action reference

Memberships is a SkyVerge extension sold through the Woo Marketplace. Plans are separate from products: a plan can be sold as a product, granted by buying one of several products, or assigned manually (the WP-CLI access modes are free, signup, purchase and manual-only). A plan restricts posts, pages, products and categories, can drip content (for example "available after one week of membership"), gives member discounts on all products, selected products or categories, offers member-only free shipping, shows a member area with the content, products, discounts and notes of the member, supports CSV import and export of members, membership notes and reminder emails for expiry and renewal. With Subscriptions installed it adds recurring billing, instalment-style plans, free trials and pause, upgrade and downgrade with proration; it also works without Subscriptions. Companion products listed on the page include Teams for WooCommerce Memberships, Mailchimp for WooCommerce Memberships and Social Login.

Plans are posts of type wc_membership_plan with the meta _product_ids, _access_length and _members_area_sections; restriction rules are stored in options (names containing wc_memberships), not in post meta. A user membership is a post of type wc_user_membership, a child of its plan with the member as author; the post status holds the membership status with a wcm- prefix, and the documentation recommends reading it through the plugin accessors. Its meta is _product_id, _order_id, _subscription_id, _start_date, _end_date (0 for unlimited) and _paused_date. Notes are comments on that post. The data-structure page does not mention HPOS; the product page does list it as supported, and memberships are posts, not orders.

Source: WooCommerce Memberships docs: function reference

A Pocket Coffee check with those functions, not run for the reason given above:

Source: WooCommerce Memberships docs: function reference

The hook reference documents messages and member-area filters rather than lifecycle hooks: wc_memberships_the_restricted_content, wc_memberships_content_restricted_message, wc_memberships_product_viewing_restricted_message, wc_memberships_product_purchasing_restricted_message, wc_memberships_member_discount_message, wc_memberships_get_renew_membership_url and wc_memberships_get_cancel_membership_url, the member-area actions wc_memberships_before_members_area and wc_memberships_after_members_area, and the plugin lifecycle actions wc_memberships_activated and wc_memberships_deactivated. For status changes and membership creation the page points to the inline documentation of the plugin source, so look there for the exact names in your version.

The legacy wp wc memberships commands were deprecated in Memberships 1.13.0 in favour of the REST-backed wp wc user_membership and wp wc membership_plan groups. The CLI reference still documents plan create, plan update, plan get, plan list, plan delete and the matching membership commands, with arguments such as --name, --slug, --access, --length, --product, --start_date, --end_date and --status for plans and --customer, --plan, --order, --product, --subscription and --status for memberships (the example commands on that page are not guaranteed to match the command names, so run wp help wc on your install first).

Memberships 1.28.0 and later register WordPress Abilities (the Memberships documentation names WordPress core 6.9 as the version that provides the Abilities API): woocommerce-memberships/plans-create, plans-get, plans-list, plans-delete and user-memberships-create, -get, -list, -delete, all requiring the manage_woocommerce capability. They are not exposed to the WooCommerce MCP server by default; the documentation shows a woocommerce_mcp_include_ability filter that returns true for IDs starting with woocommerce-memberships/ to opt in, with a privacy notice that connected clients can then reach personal data. See the AI and MCP page for the Abilities API itself.

Source: WooCommerce Memberships docs: CLI reference

Source: WooCommerce Memberships docs: abilities reference

The product page lists bookable products with fixed time slots or flexible ranges in minutes, hours or days (the FAQ adds weeks and months); availability rules at store, product and resource level with buffers and lead time; resources (staff, rooms, equipment) with their own availability; persons with minimum, maximum and person types; group, day, time-based and per-person pricing; confirmation by the merchant; notification and reminder emails; availability in the customer’s time zone; and Google Calendar sync. Bookings works with any WooCommerce payment gateway. Pocket Coffee would sell a two-hour "Cupping class" for up to eight persons with a resource "Tasting room" and a maximum of one class per evening; the shop that sells the starter kit and the class together needs nothing beyond Bookings itself.

A booking is created as soon as it is added to the cart and removed after 60 minutes if the order is not placed (filter woocommerce_bookings_remove_inactive_cart_time, in minutes). The valid statuses named on the programmatic-creation page are unpaid, pending, confirmed, cancelled and complete; the reference lists generic transition actions.

Source: WooCommerce Bookings docs: action and filter reference

create_wc_booking( $product_id, $new_booking_data = array(), $status = 'confirmed', $exact = false ) creates a booking. The data keys are product_id, start_date, end_date and resource_id by default, plus user_id, order_item_id, persons, cost, all_day and parent_id; order_item_id is how a booking is linked to an order that contains a bookable product, and the documentation does not discuss HPOS for this function. A sketch for the Cupping class (not run: Bookings was not available):

Source: WooCommerce Bookings docs: creating bookings programmatically

The documentation’s own example creates a one-week follow-up booking from the hooks above, skipping bookings that already have a parent, and the same page shows loading a booking with get_wc_booking(). The shape of persons depends on the person types the product defines, so read the booking data in the admin before copying that line.

After wp plugin activate pocket-coffee-memberships the role exists:

(one line of the table). The pass and a club-only product were created with WP-CLI, with the category club-only created first:

Source: WooCommerce docs: WC-CLI overview

(The ids 30, 240 and 241 are the ones this store assigned.) The first version of the plugin listened only to woocommerce_order_status_completed. An order for the pass was created for the customer Ada (ada@example.test) and paid with payment_complete():

The order stopped at processing: only a virtual product that is also downloadable is completed automatically, so the grant never fired. The plugin therefore hooks both woocommerce_order_status_processing and woocommerce_order_status_completed, and the _pc_club_granted order meta makes the second call harmless. After moving the order to completed:

A renewal (a second pass bought and paid) extends from the current end date rather than from today, keeps exactly one pending expiry action, and replaying the hook for the same order changes nothing:

The year 2028 has a leap day, which is why 2027-10-27 plus 365 days is 2028-10-26. Access, the club-only store and the member price, as guest and as member:

(the Starter kit at 24.00 EUR costs a member 21.60). Last, the expiry was exercised by moving the end date into the past, scheduling the action in the past and running only that hook through Action Scheduler’s CLI:

and Ada’s roles went back to customer with an empty _coffee_club_until and pocket_coffee_is_member() false.

Source: WooCommerce docs: CRUD objects

The whole plugin. It passes PHP_CodeSniffer with the WooCommerce-Core standard without errors or warnings, and declares compatibility with HPOS and the Cart and Checkout blocks.

Source: WooCommerce docs: High-Performance Order Storage