About this plugin
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. ”
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.pot template 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.