Installing WXP Opening Times: Jewish and Islamic holidays

WXP Opening Times: Jewish and Islamic holidays is a free add-on for WXP Opening Times. After you activate it, the holiday list in your exceptions has two more groups, Jewish holidays and Islamic holidays. The dates are calculated on your own server for every year; nothing is fetched from the internet. This guide takes about five minutes.

Before you start #

• WordPress 6.5 or newer.
• PHP 8.1 or newer. Your hosting company can tell you which PHP version you use.
• WXP Opening Times, version 0.11.0 or newer, installed and active. The add-on does nothing without it.
• Administrator access to your WordPress site.

Step 1: Install the add-on #

1. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins → Add New Plugin.
3. Search for WXP Opening Times: Jewish and Islamic holidays, click Install Now and then Activate.

If you have the ZIP file instead, click Upload Plugin at the top of the page, choose the ZIP (do not extract it), click Install Now and then Activate Plugin.

Step 2: Use a holiday in an exception #

1. Open Opening times in the WordPress admin menu and go to Set exceptions.
2. Add a holiday rule and open the list of holidays. You now see the groups Jewish holidays and Islamic holidays.
3. Choose a holiday, for example Yom Kippur or Eid al-Fitr, and set it to closed, or to open from and to a time.

Step 3: Check the dates (Islamic holidays) #

The Islamic calendar follows the moon, and each country announces the start of a month after the moon sighting. A calculated date can therefore differ by a day, sometimes two, from the one in your country.

1. Open the settings page of the add-on under Opening times (the page is called Holiday dates).
2. Choose the calculation: Umm al-Qura (the calendar of Saudi Arabia, needs the PHP intl extension), the tabular calendar, or Automatic, which uses Umm al-Qura when it is available.
3. If a date is off, shift all holidays of that month (for example Shawwal for Eid al-Fitr) by one or two days, forwards or backwards.

The same page lists the calculated dates of this year and the next, so you can check them against a calendar.

Good to know #

• Evenings: a Jewish or Islamic day starts at sunset on the evening before. The dates are the daytime of the holiday. If you close earlier on the evening before, add a period rule for that day.
• Deactivating the add-on: your holiday rules stay in the schedule. They show as “not available” and do nothing until the add-on is active again.

Troubleshooting #

• The Jewish and Islamic groups are not in the list: check under Plugins → Installed Plugins that both WXP Opening Times and this add-on are active, and that Opening Times is version 0.11.0 or newer. WordPress shows a notice when it is missing or too old.
• Installation fails: check that the file is the original ZIP and that your site has enough disk space.
• A date is a day off: see Step 3.
• Changes are not visible: clear any caching plugin, server cache or CDN, then refresh the page.

Updates and support #

When a new version is available, WordPress shows an update notice on the Plugins page. Need help? Open a ticket on the support page.