The simple solution for digital shift scheduling.

Alexander Nusselt

<p>Dienstplan is a self-hosted shift and duty roster planner for WordPress. It is built for organisations that run on volunteers — fire departments, emergency medical services, first-responder teams, crisis-response groups, sports clubs and similar associations — where the schedule has to work without a full-time coordinator chasing people through group chats.</p>
<p>Members sign up for shifts themselves on a public calendar page. Coordinators see at a glance which shifts are still open, who already volunteered, and who has not yet contributed this period. Every change is recorded so questions like “who removed me from Saturday?” have a clear answer.</p>
<p>The plugin runs entirely on your own WordPress install. Member data, schedules and assignments stay in your database — no SaaS account to maintain, and no recurring fee to use the free version. The only optional outbound connection is the public-holiday lookup via openholidaysapi.org (disabled by default; see <strong>External services</strong> below).</p>
<h4>What you can do with it</h4>
<ul>
<li>Define shift types (early/late/night, driver/paramedic, whatever your organisation uses) and assign them to your roster (multiple rosters with the Basis or Pro add-on)</li>
<li>Build week-by-week or month-view rosters that members open from any page on your site via the <code>[dienstplan]</code> shortcode</li>
<li>Let members sign themselves up for shifts and remove themselves again — coordinators see the change live, no email ping-pong</li>
<li>Plan events (training nights, fundraisers, on-call duties) with categories and show them on the calendar; per-event signup lists come with the Basis or Pro add-on</li>
<li>Group-based access restrictions for shifts and events (Basis & Pro add-on)</li>
<li>Show every user their personal upcoming shifts in a dashboard widget</li>
</ul>
<h4>Why on WordPress</h4>
<p>Most volunteer-run organisations already operate a WordPress site for public information, news and member communication. Adding a roster directly into that existing site means:</p>
<ul>
<li>No new login for your members — they use the WordPress account they already have</li>
<li>No new tool to introduce to a board or executive committee</li>
<li>No vendor lock-in — your data sits in your own database, exportable any time</li>
<li>No data-protection paperwork for an external SaaS — everything stays on your server</li>
</ul>
<h4>Free, Basis and Pro</h4>
<p>The plugin you install from WordPress.org is the <strong>Free</strong> version and stays free forever. It includes one shift schedule, unlimited members, shift types and future events — no artificial caps on how much you can plan.</p>
<p>Two optional commercial add-ons extend the same plugin in place:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Basis</strong> — recurring events, shift trading between members, group-based shift restrictions, weekday restrictions for shift types, automated email notifications, and a community feedback channel. Suitable for established teams that need self-service workflows.</li>
<li><strong>Pro</strong> — everything in Basis plus statistics with exportable totals, a tamper-evident audit log, iCal feed and printable PDF export, and event attachments (briefings, route sheets, maps). Suitable for organisations with reporting or audit obligations.</li>
</ul>
<p>Details, pricing and the upgrade path are documented at <a href="https://www.wp-dienstplan.de" rel="nofollow ugc">wp-dienstplan.de</a>. The add-on is installed as a separate plugin alongside the Free version — your data, settings and rosters carry over automatically.</p>
<h4>Languages</h4>
<p>The plugin ships with translations for English, German, Spanish, French and Italian. The source strings are English; additional languages can be added via standard <code>.po</code>/<code>.mo</code> files in the <code>languages/</code> directory.</p>
<h3>External services</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to the public OpenHolidays API (<code>https://openholidaysapi.org</code>) to retrieve official public-holiday dates for the country and (optional) region configured under <strong>Dienstplan <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Settings <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Holidays</strong>. The dates are stored in your own WordPress options and shown as background highlights on the calendar so members can see at a glance which days are public holidays. The feature is fully optional — clearing the holiday country in settings disables every outbound call.</p>
<p>It sends a request to <code>https://openholidaysapi.org</code> in three situations:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>GET /Countries</code> — once, when the admin opens the holiday-settings page and the country list has not been cached yet. No payload, only an HTTP request.</li>
<li><code>GET /Subdivisions?countryIsoCode=XX</code> — once per country, when the admin selects a country in the settings UI to populate the region dropdown. The configured country code is transmitted as a query parameter.</li>
<li><code>GET /PublicHolidays?countryIsoCode=XX&languageIsoCode=YY&validFrom=YYYY-01-01&validTo=YYYY-12-31[&subdivisionCode=ZZZZ]</code> — once per year via WordPress cron, plus on demand when the admin triggers a manual refresh from the settings page. The configured country code, region code (if any), language code and requested year are sent as query parameters.</li>
</ul>
<p>In every case, <strong>only configuration values entered by the administrator are transmitted</strong> (country / region / language / year). No member names, email addresses, shift data or audit-log entries are sent.</p>
<p>This service is provided by STÜBER SYSTEMS GmbH as an Open Data project: <a href="https://www.stueber.de/en/legal/imprint.php" rel="nofollow ugc">terms of use</a>, <a href="https://www.stueber.de/en/legal/privacy.php" rel="nofollow ugc">privacy policy</a>. Project documentation and the data-source overview are available at <a href="https://www.openholidaysapi.org" rel="nofollow ugc">https://www.openholidaysapi.org</a>.</p>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p>Dienstplan is built so that all member-related data — names, email addresses (from the WordPress user account), shift assignments, signup history, audit-log entries — stays exclusively in your own WordPress database. The free plugin makes no outbound HTTP requests other than the OpenHolidays calls documented in <strong>External services</strong> above.</p>
<h4>If you use the optional Basis or Pro add-on</h4>
<p>The commercial add-on contacts a separate license server at <code>lizenz.wp-dienstplan.de</code> for license activation and a daily license-status check. The data transmitted is limited to the license key, your site URL, and a status flag — no member data, no shift data and no email addresses are sent. License-server activity is logged with industry-standard webserver logs (IP, timestamp, user agent) for fraud prevention; the privacy policy at <a href="https://www.wp-dienstplan.de" rel="nofollow ugc">wp-dienstplan.de</a> documents this in detail. The license server is <strong>not</strong> active in the free plugin distributed via WordPress.org.</p>
<h4>Cookies and trackers</h4>
<p>Dienstplan sets no cookies of its own and uses no third-party trackers. The plugin relies on WordPress’s standard authentication cookies for member login and on <code>localStorage</code> for remembering the last selected roster on multi-roster pages.</p>


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