Dienstplan

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.

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.

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 External services below).

What you can do with it

• 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)
• Build week-by-week or month-view rosters that members open from any page on your site via the [dienstplan] shortcode
• Let members sign themselves up for shifts and remove themselves again — coordinators see the change live, no email ping-pong
• 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
• Group-based access restrictions for shifts and events (Basis & Pro add-on)
• Show every user their personal upcoming shifts in a dashboard widget

Why on WordPress

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:

• No new login for your members — they use the WordPress account they already have
• No new tool to introduce to a board or executive committee
• No vendor lock-in — your data sits in your own database, exportable any time
• No data-protection paperwork for an external SaaS — everything stays on your server

Free, Basis and Pro

The plugin you install from WordPress.org is the Free 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.

Two optional commercial add-ons extend the same plugin in place:

• Basis — 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.
• Pro — 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.

Details, pricing and the upgrade path are documented at wp-dienstplan.de. The add-on is installed as a separate plugin alongside the Free version — your data, settings and rosters carry over automatically.

Languages

The plugin ships with translations for English, German, Spanish, French and Italian. The source strings are English; additional languages can be added via standard .po/.mo files in the languages/ directory.

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.