HoursPilot

Business hours, holidays and a live open/closed badge for one or more locations.

Features

• Multiple locations, each with its own time zone
• Several opening hours per day (lunch breaks), "open 24 hours", hours past midnight
• Holidays and special hours (single days or date ranges), optionally repeating every year
• Countdown to opening / closing, calendar month view, vertical or horizontal layout
• Two styles: clean (default) and card, with a coloured header band, today's date, an OPEN/CLOSED badge, custom open/closed messages and a header image
• Lunch and other breaks with labels ("Lunch"), shown in the hours but counted as closed
• Map below the location details (OpenStreetMap or Google Maps), loaded only after a click
• Everything set per location in wp-admin, in tabs: General, Hours, Holidays, Messages, Display, Appearance, Location; a bare [hourspilot id="…"] is enough
• Shared holidays for all locations (e.g. public holidays), with opt-out per location
• Closed on public holidays automatically: tick the box, pick a source (Nager.Date or OpenHolidays API) and a country
• Import / export of locations as JSON
• Day names in the site language automatically, week start from Settings → General
• Live "Open now / Closed now" badge, computed in the browser by a small Rust/WebAssembly engine, so page caches never show a stale status
• schema.org OpeningHoursSpecification + specialOpeningHoursSpecification JSON-LD
• Works anywhere shortcodes do: block editor, Elementor, widgets
• Translated into Swedish and Arabic (right-to-left layout, optional Arabic-Indic digits ٠١٢…)

Screenshots

Card style (style="card")

Status band, message, lunch break, map	Arabic	Monospace, Swedish

Admin

Clean style (default)

Tuesday 16:35, 25 minutes before closing, with short holiday hours later in the week:

English	Swedish	Arabic (digits="arab")

layout="horizontal" holiday_hours="1"

layout="calendar" (English and Arabic)

Installation

Download hourspilot-X.Y.Z.zip from Releases (not the "Source code" archives), then WordPress → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. Add locations under Locations in the admin menu.

Usage

Business hours in the admin menu:

• Locations / Add location: one location per shop, office or branch, each with its settings in tabs:
  • General: time zone, business type (for search engines)
  • Hours: Open / Closed / Open 24 hours per day, several time slots per day, labels and breaks ("Lunch")
  • Holidays: holidays and special hours, every year or once; whether to also use the shared holidays; Closed on public holidays with source and country (your own holidays win on the same day, so add a day with hours to stay open)
  • Messages: every text visitors see (status, badges, open/closed messages, "Closed All Day", countdowns)
  • Display: what to show (week or today, layout, header, local time, grouping, hidden days, holidays, countdowns, formats, digits, details, structured data)
  • Appearance: style (clean or card), font, colours, header band and image, map
  • Location: address, phones, email, website, map link and map position
• Shared holidays: holidays every location uses
• Import / Export: all locations as one JSON file, or one location via Export in the list; imports become drafts

Then paste the shortcode from the location's sidebar into a page.

Shortcode

[hourspilot id="123"]

Omit id to use the first location.

Every attribute can also be set on the location (tabs Messages, Display, Appearance); the shortcode attribute overrides it. ¹ Usually set in the Appearance tab.

Breaks: in the weekly hours, give a time slot a label (e.g. "Lunch") and tick Break: it is shown with the label but counts as closed.

How it works

flowchart LR
    subgraph wp["WordPress (PHP)"]
        admin["Admin: Locations<br/>weekly hours, holidays, info"] -->|post meta| db[("hourspilot_location")]
        db --> sc["Shortcode [hourspilot]"]
        lang["languages/<br/>sv_SE, ar"] -.->|labels, day + month names| sc
        sc --> ld["schema.org JSON-LD"]
    end
    subgraph browser["Browser"]
        page["Page: hours table<br/>+ data-hp JSON"]
        js["frontend.js"]
        wasm[["hourspilot.wasm<br/>Rust time engine"]]
        page --> js
        js -->|"config + local time<br/>in the location's time zone"| wasm
        wasm -->|"status, countdown,<br/>holiday rows, calendar"| js
        js -->|"updates every 30 s<br/>(1 s with countdowns)"| page
    end
    sc -->|server-rendered HTML| page
    cache["Page cache"] -.->|cached HTML stays correct| page

The server renders the hours once; everything that depends on now (open/closed, countdowns, today's holiday, the calendar) is computed in the browser by the Rust engine. A cached page therefore never shows a stale status.

External services

Only if Closed on public holidays is ticked for a location, the server (never the visitor's browser) fetches the country list and that country's public holidays from the chosen source. Sent: the country code and the year. Results are cached for a week. Nothing is fetched while the option is off.

• Nager.Date (date.nager.at): terms, privacy
• OpenHolidays API (openholidaysapi.org): privacy

The map in the Location tab is loaded from OpenStreetMap or Google Maps only after the visitor clicks it.

Translations

English (source), Swedish (sv_SE) and Arabic (ar) ship in languages/: .po (editable), .mo (WordPress 6.0–6.4) and .l10n.php (WordPress 6.5+). The site language (Settings → General) picks them automatically; day and month names come from WordPress itself. Arabic gets a right-to-left layout through direction-neutral CSS.

To add a language: copy languages/hourspilot.pot to hourspilot-<locale>.po, translate it (e.g. with Poedit), then compile with wp i18n make-mo languages/ && wp i18n make-php languages/. After changing texts in the code, refresh the template with wp i18n make-pot . languages/hourspilot.pot --exclude=rust,.github,languages and wp i18n update-po languages/hourspilot.pot languages/.

Styling

Most things are set in the Appearance box. For more, override CSS variables on .hourspilot:

--hp-accent, --hp-open, --hp-soon, --hp-shut, --hp-line, --hp-radius, --hp-pad, and for the card style --hp-band, --hp-band-open, --hp-band-closed, --hp-band-edge, --hp-dot, --hp-chip.

Developers

Filters: hourspilot_schema( array $data, int $location_id ), hourspilot_digits( string $system ) (latn | arab)

Data is stored as post meta on the hourspilot_location post type: _hourspilot_hours, _hourspilot_holidays (from, to, label, slots, recurring), _hourspilot_info, _hourspilot_timezone, _hourspilot_schema_type, _hourspilot_settings, _hourspilot_use_shared, _hourspilot_public_holidays (source, country). Fetched public holidays are cached in transients hourspilot_ph_*.

Uninstalling the plugin does not delete your locations.

Time engine

rust/ (Rust, GPL-2.0-or-later) is compiled to assets/hourspilot.wasm; the compiler version is pinned in rust/rust-toolchain.toml.

cd rust
cargo test && cargo build --release --target wasm32-unknown-unknown
cp target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/hourspilot_core.wasm ../assets/hourspilot.wasm

Releases

1. Bump Version and HOURSPILOT_VERSION in hourspilot.php, the version above, and add a ### X.Y.Z entry under Changelog.
2. Commit, then git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m "HoursPilot X.Y.Z" && git push origin master vX.Y.Z.

.github/workflows/release.yml checks the versions, lints PHP 7.4 + 8.3, runs the Rust tests, builds the WebAssembly fresh and publishes the installable zip as a GitHub release with this changelog entry as notes. Tags with a hyphen (v1.0.0-beta.1) become pre-releases.

The zip gets a wordpress.org readme.txt generated from this file (.github/scripts/readme-txt.py); the Contributors and Tags rows above exist for it.

Changelog

0.7.0

• Unique hourspilot_ prefix for the post type, post meta, transients, admin pages and actions (wordpress.org guidelines); data of earlier versions is moved automatically on update
• Plugin icon and banner
• Tested up to WordPress 7.1

0.6.0

• Closed on public holidays (Holidays tab): pick a source (Nager.Date, OpenHolidays API) and a country; nationwide public holidays are shown as closed, cached weekly, with a preview of the next ones
• Own and shared holidays override a public holiday on the same day
• Included in import / export

0.5.0

• Location editor with tabs (General, Hours, Holidays, Messages, Display, Appearance, Location) and HoursPilot's own icons; new admin menu icon
• Every shortcode option can be set per location; the shortcode only needs the id
• Hours: Open / Closed / Open 24 hours as buttons
• Shared holidays (Business hours → Shared holidays), opt-out per location
• Import / Export of locations as JSON (all, or one from the list)
• The 0.4.0 Appearance box settings carry over automatically
• All new texts in Swedish and Arabic

0.4.0

• Card style (style="card"): header band with today's date, OPEN/CLOSED badge, local time, open/closed messages, dashed rows, a dot before today, image beside the location details
• Header band colour from the accent, the status (green/red) or an own colour; header background image
• Monospace font option
• Breaks: time slots with a label ("Lunch") that count as closed; labels on any slot
• Map below the location details: OpenStreetMap or Google Maps, click to load (map, map_consent); map position field
• Second phone number
• Appearance box per location (style, colours, font, header image, map) as defaults for the shortcode
• time_format, holidays_position, hide_hours_on_holiday, header_date_format, badge_open/badge_closed, open_message/closed_message
• All new texts translated into Swedish and Arabic

0.3.1

• Horizontal layout: 12-hour times wrap inside the day cards instead of overlapping the next day
• Arabic calendar: the month arrows point the right way (the browser already mirrors them)
• Local time without a leading zero ("4:35 PM"), like WordPress's own times
• README screenshots (English, Swedish, Arabic)

0.3.0

• Swedish and Arabic translations; .pot template for more languages
• Right-to-left layout (direction-neutral CSS, mirrored calendar arrows)
• digits="arab": Arabic-Indic digits in times, dates, countdowns and the calendar
• Translatable list separator (Arabic "،")
• Translations load on init (no "loaded too early" notice on WordPress 6.7+)

0.2.0

• Time engine rewritten in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly (source in rust/)
• Recurring holidays ("Every year")
• Countdown to opening and closing (open_countdown, close_countdown)
• Calendar month view and horizontal layout (layout="calendar|horizontal")
• Holiday hours can replace this week's regular hours (holiday_hours="1")
• Opening times more than a week away are shown with their date

0.1.0

• First release