About this plugin
Oversight Shabbat closes the public side of your site from candle-lighting until havdalah, and shows visitors a message page instead. It is built for Israeli sites and fully translatable, including right-to-left languages such as Hebrew.
- Automatic times — Shabbat and Yom Tov times (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, Pesach, Shavuot) from Hebcal.com, using the Israeli holiday calendar. The lock starts at the earliest candle-lighting and ends at the latest havdalah among Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Be’er Sheva, Eilat and Tzfat, so it is safe for the whole country. Times are refreshed once a day.
- Fixed hours — use a fixed weekly window instead of automatic times. These hours are also the fallback when no Hebcal data is available.
- Manual locks — add extra date/time periods (holidays, events) and an instant “Lock now” switch.
- Custom lock page — title, message (full editor), logo, colors, the time the site reopens and a live countdown.
- WooCommerce orders blocked — during a lock no new order can be placed, not even from a cached checkout page, the block checkout or express-pay buttons. Payment confirmations for orders started before Shabbat still complete.
- SEO-safe — visitors and search engines get HTTP 503 with a Retry-After header, which tells Google the downtime is temporary. robots.txt and sitemaps stay available.
- Cache-aware — page caches are purged when a lock starts and ends, and a tiny script shows the lock page even if a cached copy was served.
- Administrators keep seeing the site normally, with a red notice bar.
- All times use Israel time, regardless of the WordPress timezone setting.
External services
com/hebcal) to get Shabbat and Jewish holiday times (candle-lighting and havdalah) for Israel.
- When: only while Shabbat mode is enabled and set to “Automatic” times — once a day (WP-Cron), when automatic mode is first switched on, after a plugin update, and when an administrator clicks “Refresh times now”. Nothing is sent while the plugin is disabled or set to fixed hours.
- What is sent: one request per city with fixed parameters only — the city’s GeoNames ID (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Be’er Sheva, Eilat, Tzfat) and a date range (the next 60 days). No visitor, user or site data is sent, apart from the standard HTTP request information (such as the server’s IP address and the WordPress user agent).
- Service provider: Hebcal.com. Data is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Terms / API documentation, Privacy policy.
No other external services are used. The plugin does not track visitors and does not contact the plugin author.