Description
Buffet Calendar and Meal Schedule is the easiest way to publish daily opening hours, buffet times, meal-service windows, and pricing on a WordPress site. Whether you run a hotel breakfast buffet, a restaurant with changing weekly hours, a café with coffee & cake afternoons, or a seasonal resort, this plugin shows guests at a glance what’s open today and what’s coming this month.
Every day on the calendar is color-coded by a label category you control — Breakfast, Lunch Buffet, Dinner Buffet, Brunch, Coffee & Cake, Closed, Happy Hour, Holiday, or anything else you need. A legend below the calendar explains what each color means and what it costs, so visitors stop calling to ask « are you serving lunch today? »
Who is it for?
- Hotels publishing breakfast, lunch, and dinner buffet schedules
- Restaurants with different opening hours each weekday
- Cafés and tea houses showing coffee & cake afternoons
- Spa, wellness, and resort venues with daily program availability
- Seasonal businesses — beach clubs, ski lodges, vineyards, beer gardens, lake restaurants — with hours that change through the year
- Wedding and event venues marking open vs. booked dates
- Co-working spaces, museums, and tourist sites with weekly opening hours
- Any business that wants a clean monthly view of « what’s open and when »
Why not a regular events plugin?
Most WordPress calendar and event plugins are built for bookings, classes, ticketing, or one-off events. They’re complex and overkill when all you need is to display what’s available each day. Buffet Calendar focuses on this single job — color-coded daily availability with a legend — and does it cleanly, without bookings, payments, or guest data.
Key features
- Unlimited custom label categories — add as many label rows as you need (Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch Buffet, Dinner Buffet, Coffee & Cake, Closed, Holiday, Happy Hour, Pool Bar, Spa, etc.). The 6 defaults work for most hotels and restaurants out of the box.
- WordPress color picker per label — choose any hex color for each label. Calendar cells and the legend swatch update together. Default palette of yellow, green, orange, blue, beige, and red is pre-loaded.
- Enable / disable any label — toggle labels off temporarily without deleting them. Perfect for seasonal categories (e.g. a summer « Pool Bar » you want to hide in winter). Days already tagged with a disabled label keep their color until you reassign them.
- Add and remove labels — fully dynamic Settings page. Each label has its own row with a textarea for the displayed text, a color picker, an enabled checkbox, and a remove button.
- 12 months at a glance — first 3 months shown by default; remaining months reveal with a « Show more » button so visitors can plan ahead.
- Translucent color cells — each day cell is tinted so the date number and weekday/weekend background still read cleanly underneath.
- Responsive 3-column layout — three months side-by-side on desktop, two on tablet, single column on mobile. Works inside any theme.
- Shortcode-driven — drop
[buffet_calendar_frontend]into any page, post, classic editor, block editor, or widget area. Compatible with Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, and other page builders. - Translation-ready — every visible string is wrapped for WordPress i18n. A
.pottemplate ships in/languages/. Frontend month and day names follow your site’s WordPress language automatically. - English-only admin UI — admin pages always display in English regardless of site locale, so multi-language teams stay on the same page.
- No external services — no tracking, no analytics, no third-party API calls, no telemetry. Everything stays on your server.
- Privacy-friendly — no cookies, no guest data collection, no reservations or payments. GDPR-friendly by design.
- Lightweight — minimal CSS and JS. The frontend doesn’t load any heavy frameworks.
How it works
- Open Calendar > Calendar Settings, set your label text and pick a color for each. Add or remove labels as needed.
- Open Calendar, assign a label to each day from a dropdown.
- Place
[buffet_calendar_frontend]on any page. Done.
Captures d’écrans



Installation
- Upload the plugin folder to
/wp-content/plugins/hapnics-buffet-meals-schedule-calendar, or install through the WordPress Plugins screen and search for « Hapnics Buffet and Meals Schedule Calendar ». - Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu.
- Go to Calendar > Calendar Settings to customize label text, colors, and which labels are enabled. Six defaults are pre-loaded so you can preview immediately.
- Go to Calendar to assign a label to each day for the next several months.
- Add the shortcode
[buffet_calendar_frontend]to any page or post.
FAQ
-
Can I use this for something other than a hotel?
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Yes. Labels and colors are fully customizable. Use it for restaurant opening hours, café schedules, spa daily programs, gym class times, museum hours, holiday opening hours, or any recurring « what’s open today » display.
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Can I add my own colors?
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Yes. Each label has its own WordPress color picker on the Settings page. Pick any hex color — the calendar cell tint and the legend swatch update automatically.
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Can I have more than 6 label categories?
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Yes. Click Add Label on the Settings page to add as many labels as you want. Each gets its own color, text, and enabled toggle. There’s no fixed limit.
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Can I temporarily hide a category without deleting it?
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Yes. Uncheck the Enabled box for that label and save. It disappears from the legend and the day-picker dropdown, but days already assigned to that label keep showing the saved color so historical data isn’t lost. Re-enable any time.
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Can I show prices in the legend?
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Yes — labels are free-text, so include prices, durations, à la carte notes, or anything else. Example:
Lunch Buffet 12 pm – 2 pm — €18orBreakfast 7:30 am – 10 am (included with stay). -
Does it support languages other than English?
-
Yes. A
.pottranslation template ships atlanguages/hapnics-buffet-meals-schedule-calendar.pot. The calendar’s month and day names automatically follow your WordPress site language on the frontend. Admin pages stay in English. -
Does it handle bookings, reservations, or payments?
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No — by design. This is purely a schedule display plugin. It does not take bookings, collect customer data, or process payments. Use a dedicated booking plugin for that.
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Does it work in the block editor / Gutenberg?
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Yes. Add a Shortcode block and paste
[buffet_calendar_frontend]. -
Does it work with Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, and other page builders?
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Yes. Insert the shortcode into any text or HTML widget in your page builder.
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How many months does it show?
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12 months total. The first 3 are visible immediately; the next 9 appear when the visitor clicks Show more. Visitors get the rest of the year without overwhelming the page on first load.
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Will it slow my site down?
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No. The plugin makes no external API calls, no tracking requests, and ships with minimal CSS and JS. The data sits in two
wp_optionsrows. -
Will it conflict with my theme?
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The plugin uses a scoped
.calendar-frontendwrapper and prefixed class names. Most themes work out of the box. If your theme overrides the colors, you can adjust them in your theme’s CSS. -
How do I uninstall it cleanly?
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Just deactivate and delete the plugin from the Plugins screen. The plugin’s options are removed automatically via the bundled
uninstall.php.
Avis
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Contributeurs/contributrices & développeurs/développeuses
« Hapnics Buffet and Meals Schedule Calendar » est un logiciel libre. Les personnes suivantes ont contribué à cette extension.
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Journal des modifications
1.0.0
- Initial public release.
- Color-coded 12-month calendar with shortcode
[buffet_calendar_frontend]. - Fully dynamic Settings page: add unlimited labels, pick any color via the WordPress color picker, enable / disable per label, remove labels.
- Six pre-loaded default labels (Breakfast, Lunch, Brunch, Coffee & Cake, etc.) with the original yellow / green / orange / blue / beige / red palette.
- Translucent calendar cell tinting with matching legend swatches.
- « Show more » toggle for months 4–12.
- Locale-aware frontend month and day names; English-only admin UI.
- Translation-ready with a
.pottemplate atlanguages/hapnics-buffet-meals-schedule-calendar.pot. - Clean uninstall — plugin options are deleted via
uninstall.php.
