Description
RideDesk Widgets puts your booking, enquiry and vehicle-rental forms on your WordPress site. It is the WordPress front door to RideDesk, the booking and dispatch software used by private-hire, airport-transfer and chauffeur companies to quote, dispatch, invoice and get paid.
Drop a form into any page or post with a block or a shortcode. The visitor gets a quote-first booking flow with address autocomplete, a route map, and a price calculated from your own rate card. You get the booking in your RideDesk panel, already attached to the customer, the vehicle class and the campaign that produced it.
The three widgets
- Booking — one-way, return or by-the-hour. The visitor enters a route, sees the distance and duration, then picks a vehicle class at your price. Step two takes their details, your optional paid extras and a flight number for airport pickups. If you have not built a rate card yet, the same form collects the trip and files it as a quote request instead, so it is useful from day one.
- Enquiry — a contact form that lands in your RideDesk inbox rather than an email folder. It is spam-classified, matched to the customer’s history and routed to your team. You define the topics and any extra fields you need.
- Rental — your vehicles with daily and hourly rates, for operators who rent as well as drive.
What you do not have to set up
No API keys. No Google Cloud project, no billing account, no map credentials. Address autocomplete and routing are handled for you, falling back to open data when no commercial provider is configured. Nothing to renew, nothing to leak.
No payment plumbing either. If you take payment online, the visitor is handed to RideDesk’s hosted payment page, which uses your own Stripe, PayPal, SumUp or Mollie account. Card details never touch your WordPress site, so your site never becomes part of your payment security scope.
Why the forms live on your RideDesk domain
The plugin renders each form in a responsive frame served from your own RideDesk domain. That is a deliberate design choice with three consequences worth knowing before you install it.
- The plugin does not go stale. Every improvement shipped to the forms appears on your site the same day. You are not waiting on a plugin update, and you are not one skipped update away from a broken booking form.
- Prices are decided on the server. The quote a visitor sees is calculated by RideDesk from your rate card, zones and rules, then verified again when the booking is created. A price cannot be edited in the browser before it reaches you.
- One place to change things. Colours, corner radius, languages and behaviour are set once in your RideDesk panel and apply to every site you embed on. There is no CSS to write and nothing to keep in sync.
Contact Form 7 integration
Already using Contact Form 7? Enable the bridge under Settings RideDesk Widgets and every successful CF7 submission is ALSO filed as an enquiry in your RideDesk panel — spam-classified, your team notified, matched to the customer’s booking history. Your existing forms and their emails stay exactly as they are. Conventional CF7 field names (your-name, your-email, your-tel, your-subject, your-message) are mapped automatically; developers can remap custom forms via the ridedesk_widgets_cf7_payload filter.
Knowing which advert produced the booking
A form inside a frame can only see the page it sits on, not the campaign that brought the visitor to your site three pages earlier. RideDesk Widgets closes that gap: an optional script records the arrival page, the referring site and any UTM tags for the length of the visit, and hands them to the form when the visitor actually books. Each booking then tells you which campaign and which landing page produced it.
It sets no cookies, stores nothing a visitor types, and keeps what it does record in the browser’s own sessionStorage until the tab closes. Untick one box to turn it off entirely.
Usage
Add the RideDesk Widget block in the editor, or use shortcodes anywhere shortcodes work, including page builders:
[ridedesk_widget type="booking"][ridedesk_widget type="enquiry"][ridedesk_widget type="rental" lang="de" height="520"]
Requirements
A RideDesk account is required, with the Widgets add-on active. The forms render your organisation’s live vehicles, rate card and settings, so there is nothing meaningful for the plugin to show without one. If you do not have an account, start at ridedesk.app before installing.
The plugin itself is free and always will be. It adds no upsells to your admin, no dashboard widgets and no banners.
External services
This plugin embeds forms from your own RideDesk domain (e.g. yourcompany.ridedesk.app or your custom domain connected to RideDesk) inside an iframe.
Visitor attribution (on by default, Settings RideDesk Widgets). When enabled, every page of your site loads one small script, https://<your-domain>/embed/attribution.js, from your own RideDesk domain. It records — in the browser’s sessionStorage, for the duration of the visit — the page the visitor arrived on, the referring website, any utm_source/utm_medium/utm_campaign parameters in the URL, the paths of the pages they view on your site, and a random id that groups those into one visit. That record is sent to your RideDesk account only when the visitor actually submits a booking or enquiry, so your bookings can tell you which campaign and which page produced them. It sets no cookies and collects nothing a visitor types — no names, emails, phone numbers or form contents. It loads on every page rather than only pages with a form because the arrival page is the thing being recorded. Switch it off in the plugin settings and no such request is made. RideDesk privacy policy
Apart from that script, no data is sent anywhere until a visitor interacts with the embedded form. Depending on your RideDesk configuration, the embedded form itself may load:
- RideDesk (form content, address suggestions, prices) — privacy policy
- OpenStreetMap map tiles — privacy policy
- OSRM (project-osrm.org) for route distance/duration
- Cloudflare Turnstile or Google reCAPTCHA for spam protection, if enabled in your RideDesk settings — Cloudflare privacy, Google privacy
- Google Places or Photon (komoot.io) address suggestions, depending on configuration
Server-side, the plugin only contacts your own RideDesk domain, and only when the optional Contact Form 7 bridge is enabled: successful CF7 submissions (the submitted name, email, phone, subject, message and the page URL) are forwarded to https://<your-domain>/api/enquiries so they appear in your RideDesk panel. With the bridge disabled, the plugin makes no server-side requests at all. Stored options: your RideDesk domain, a default language, the visitor-attribution toggle, and the Contact Form 7 bridge toggle and its key.
Screenshots
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- RideDesk Widget Embed your RideDesk booking, enquiry or vehicle-rental form.
Installation
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Go to Settings RideDesk Widgets and enter your RideDesk domain (shown in your RideDesk panel under Settings Widgets).
- Add the RideDesk Widget block — or a shortcode — to any page.
FAQ
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Do I need a RideDesk account?
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Yes. The widgets render your organisation’s live booking forms, prices and vehicles from your RideDesk panel, so there is nothing for them to show without one. The plugin is the connector, not the booking system.
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Do I need a Google Maps API key?
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No. The plugin needs no API keys of any kind, and there is no key field to fill in. Address suggestions and route distances are served through your RideDesk account, which falls back to open data (Photon, OpenStreetMap and OSRM) when no commercial provider is configured. There is no Google Cloud project to create and no map billing to watch.
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Will the forms match my theme?
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Yes. Set four colours, a corner radius and light or dark once in your RideDesk panel and every embed follows, on every site. There is no CSS to write and no theme compatibility layer to break. The frame is transparent by default, so it sits on your own page background.
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Does it work with my page builder?
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Yes. There is a block for the editor and a shortcode for everything else, so anywhere that renders shortcodes will render the widget, including Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi and classic widget areas.
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Does it work with WooCommerce?
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It does not need WooCommerce and does not use it. Bookings, quotes and invoices live in RideDesk, and online payment goes through RideDesk’s hosted payment page on your own Stripe, PayPal, SumUp or Mollie account. If you already run WooCommerce for something else, the two simply coexist.
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Can I use several widgets on one page?
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Yes. Each frame measures and resizes itself independently, so a booking form and an enquiry form can sit on the same page without fighting over height.
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Which languages are supported?
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Twelve: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Swedish and Norwegian. Pin one per shortcode with
lang="de", or leave it and let the visitor choose. -
What happens if I deactivate the plugin?
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The embedded forms stop appearing and nothing else changes. Your bookings, customers and settings live in RideDesk and are untouched. If you delete the plugin, it removes the handful of options it stored and leaves no tables or orphaned rows behind.
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Why is the form not showing?
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Check that your RideDesk domain is set under Settings RideDesk Widgets, and that the Widgets add-on is active in your RideDesk plan. If your site enforces a strict Content Security Policy, allow frames from your RideDesk domain.
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Will my bookings tell me which ad or page produced them?
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Yes, with Visitor attribution left on (Settings RideDesk Widgets). The booking form runs inside a frame, and a frame can only see the page it sits on — not the Google or Facebook campaign that brought the visitor to your site three pages earlier. The attribution script captures that on arrival and hands it to the form, so each booking in your RideDesk panel shows the campaign, the page the visitor landed on and the pages they read on the way.
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No cookies, and nothing a visitor types. It keeps page paths, the referring site and campaign tags in the browser’s own
sessionStorage, and they are discarded when the visitor closes the tab. If you would rather not run it, untick it in the plugin settings. -
How do I report a security problem?
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Please report it privately by email to hello@ridedesk.app rather than in the public support forum, and give us a way to reach you for follow-up questions. We will confirm receipt and tell you when a fix ships.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“RideDesk Widgets – Taxi, Transfer & Chauffeur Booking Forms” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Changelog
1.1.4
- Listing only: the screenshots now come from a fully configured operator, so they show the route map, the measured distance and real per-class prices rather than an empty form. No changes to the plugin code.
1.1.3
- Listing only: a fuller description, seven screenshots and eleven answered questions, including the ones people actually ask first — API keys, themes, page builders, WooCommerce and what happens on deactivation. No changes to the plugin code.
1.1.2
- Clearer listing name and short description, so operators searching the directory can tell what the plugin does. No changes to the plugin code.
1.1.1
- Directory listing only: screenshots, banner and icon added. No changes to the plugin code.
1.1.0
- Visitor attribution: bookings and enquiries now record which campaign and which page brought the visitor. On by default; switch it off under Settings RideDesk Widgets.
1.0.0
- Initial release: booking, enquiry and rental widgets via block + shortcode, auto-resizing frames, 12 languages, Contact Form 7 bridge.