Digitizer Shabbat Keeper

Description

Digitizer Shabbat Keeper closes a WordPress site from candle lighting to Havdalah, every Shabbat and every Jewish holiday, without anyone touching it. You pick a city once. From then on the plugin works out the times itself, on your own server, and nothing is sent anywhere.

It is built for sites in Israel. The holidays are the Israeli ones (one day each), the cities are Israeli cities, and every time it shows is Israel time. A site outside Israel is not what it is for – see the FAQ.

While the site is closed, purchases and form submissions are refused. That is the purpose of the plugin, and it is what your visitors will meet on Friday evening. Administrators are never blocked, so you can always get in.

Two ways to close

• Closed – every visitor sees a “closed for Shabbat” page, with your title, your message and the time the site reopens. The page answers with HTTP 503 and a Retry-After header, which search engines read as a temporary outage, not as a missing site.
• Open to read, closed for business – pages stay readable. Purchases and forms are refused, and a banner at the top of every page says when the site reopens.

What is refused in business mode

• WooCommerce purchases – in classic templates, in the cart and checkout blocks, through the Store API, and when a customer tries to pay for an existing order
• Form submissions from Elementor Pro Forms, Contact Form 7, WPForms and Gravity Forms
• Comments
• Optionally, phone and WhatsApp links are hidden

Every refusal happens on the server. Hiding a button is a courtesy; the refusal is what makes it true.

You can switch the WooCommerce and the form refusals off separately in business mode. Closed mode always refuses both: a checkout or a form that was already open at candle lighting cannot be sent while the site says it is closed.

The times

• Candle lighting follows the custom of each city: 40 minutes before sunset in Jerusalem, 30 in Haifa, 22 in Beer Sheva, 18 elsewhere. Fifteen cities are built in, and you can enter coordinates for any other place in Israel.
• Havdalah is 42 minutes after sunset, or 72 (Rabbeinu Tam) if you prefer.
• Shabbat, both days of Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, the first day of Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, the first and seventh days of Pesach, and Shavuot. A holiday next to Shabbat is one closure, not two.
• The settings screen lists the next seven closures with their exact times, so you can check them before the first Friday.

Good to know

• Starts working when you activate it, with Jerusalem’s times, until you choose your own city. A notice in wp-admin says so until you have saved the settings once.
• Preview the closed site at any time from the settings screen.
• Override: force the site open or closed by hand, for the day the calendar does not know about.
• Page caches – WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, SiteGround Optimizer and Breeze are purged at the start and the end of every closure. A CDN that caches whole pages can hook its own purge to the digitizer_shabbat_keeper_purge action. A small script in each page also reloads it once a closure has started or ended, so a copy that a cache kept too long corrects itself.
• Hebrew is included.
• Coming from Digitizer Pro Tools? The settings of its Shabbat Keeper module are carried over the first time you activate this plugin.

For developers

• digitizer_shabbat_keeper_purge (action) – fires whenever cached pages should be thrown away: at each transition, after a settings save, on activation and deactivation.
• digitizer_shabbat_keeper_transition (action) – fires at each transition with one argument, whether the site is now closed.
• digitizer_shabbat_keeper_exempt (filter) – who is never blocked. Administrators by default.
• digitizer_shabbat_keeper_refuse (filter) – whether purchases and forms are refused in the current request. Never in WP-Cron, WP-CLI or wp-admin screens by default, so a shop manager can still build an order by hand.