If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been working on my Zmanim-WP plugin for WordPress for a while now. This blog series is designed to help you dig deeper into the plugin and understand what it does, how it works, and whether it’s right for your needs.
In the first 5 parts of this series, I more or less worked through the parts of the day, from early morning until late night.
In this section I’m going to focus on one of the most obvious use-cases for my Zmanim-WP WordPress plugin: Shabbat. Specifically, we’re going to look at the shortcodes for:
- Candle lighting ([zman_candles]) – This will display the time for lighting candles on Friday eventing.
- The Parsha ([zman_parsha]) – Displays the name of the Torah portion read that week.
- Yom Tov and Special Shabbatot ([zman_yomtov]) – If Shabbat falls on or during a holiday, this will display the name of the holiday. Additionally, if it’s a Shabbat with a special name (Shabbat Zachor, Shabbat Shekalim, etc), that will be displayed.
As with the other shortcodes in this series, these can be used as-is, or with the options described in the first post of the series.
Examples:
- [zman_candles date="saturday"]
- [zman_candles date="saturday" dateformat="g:i:s a"]
In addition both [zman_parsha] and [zman_yomtov] will take the lang= option, so that the output can display in English or Hebrew.
It’s a Matter of Opinion… kind of
None of the shortcodes require you to choose a Rabbinic opinion (shita) per say. But Candle lighting does allow you to insert your personal (or organizational) opinion of sorts. While it’s generally understood that candle lighting is 18 minutes before shkia (sunset) on Friday, some organizations will print a different time for various reasons. Therefore on the Zmanim-WP “Standard Times” page, you have the ability to change that number from the default.
No Rest For the Weary
After covering Shabbat, what else might there be? It turns out, I coded the Zmanim-WP plugin with a few more tricks up it’s sleeve. In the next installment, I’m going to cover “early” Shabbat settings.
See you next time.