Dienstplan

Dienstplan turns your WordPress site into a shift and duty roster that runs without a full-time coordinator.

It is built for teams that rely on volunteers — fire departments, emergency medical services, first-responder and crisis-response groups, sports clubs and associations. Members open a calendar page and sign up for open shifts themselves. 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 “who removed me from Saturday?” always has an answer.

Everything runs on your own WordPress install. Member data, schedules and assignments stay in your database — no SaaS account, no recurring fee for the free version. The only optional outbound connection is the public-holiday lookup via openholidaysapi.org, disabled by default (see External services).

What you can do

• Define shift types (early/late/night, driver/paramedic — whatever your team uses) and build week or month rosters
• Drop the roster onto any page with the [dienstplan] shortcode
• Let members sign up for shifts and remove themselves again — coordinators see every change live, no email ping-pong
• Plan events like training nights, fundraisers or on-call duties with categories (per-event signup lists come with Basis)
• Show each member their own upcoming shifts in a dashboard widget
• Let members download their shifts as an ICS calendar file

Why WordPress

Most volunteer organisations already run a WordPress site for news and member communication. Adding the roster there means members use the account they already have, your data stays in your own database, and there is no external SaaS to vet for data protection.

Free, Basis and Pro

The version on WordPress.org is Free and stays free forever: one shift schedule, unlimited members, shift types and events — no artificial caps.

Two optional add-ons extend the same plugin in place, with your data carrying over automatically:

• Basis — multiple rosters, recurring events, per-event signups and tasks, shift trading, group and weekday restrictions, automated email notifications, and a community feedback channel. For established teams that need self-service workflows.
• Pro — everything in Basis plus attendance statistics, a tamper-evident audit log and waiting-list promotion on full events. For organisations with reporting or audit obligations.

Pricing and the full comparison are at wp-dienstplan.de.

Languages

Ships with English, German, Spanish, French and Italian. Source strings are English; further languages can be added via standard .po/.mo files in languages/.

External services

This plugin connects to the public OpenHolidays API (https://openholidaysapi.org) to retrieve official public-holiday dates for the country and (optional) region configured under Dienstplan → Settings → Holidays. 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.

It sends a request to https://openholidaysapi.org in three situations:

• GET /Countries — once, when the admin opens the holiday-settings page and the country list has not been cached yet. No payload, only an HTTP request.
• GET /Subdivisions?countryIsoCode=XX — 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.
• GET /PublicHolidays?countryIsoCode=XX&languageIsoCode=YY&validFrom=YYYY-01-01&validTo=YYYY-12-31[&subdivisionCode=ZZZZ] — 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.

In every case, only configuration values entered by the administrator are transmitted (country / region / language / year). No member names, email addresses, shift data or audit-log entries are sent.

This service is provided by STÜBER SYSTEMS GmbH as an Open Data project: terms of use, privacy policy. Project documentation and the data-source overview are available at https://www.openholidaysapi.org.

Privacy

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 External services above.

If you use the optional Basis or Pro add-on

The commercial add-on contacts a separate license server at lizenz.wp-dienstplan.de 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 wp-dienstplan.de documents this in detail. The license server is not active in the free plugin distributed via WordPress.org.

Cookies and trackers

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 localStorage for remembering the last selected roster on multi-roster pages.