A while back I suggested a ‘holiday mode’ for vendors and shared a rough first version I’d put together for my own site. I’m currently in the process of updating my existing plugins, and it’s now had a proper rewrite, a round of real testing on staging, and a fair few tweaks and bug fixes, so I thought it was worth sharing properly.
Say hello to Holiday Mode for HivePress!
What it Does
Adds a “Holiday mode” checkbox to the vendor’s Account > Settings page.
Hides every visible listing at once, and restores each one to exactly the status it had before - published stays published, pending stays pending, scheduled stays scheduled.
Leaves your existing drafts alone. Anything you’d deliberately unpublished stays unpublished; it won’t get pushed live when you come back.
Keeps listings hidden while holiday mode is on, including any new listing you create while away.
Shows a dismissible banner on account pages so a vendor always knows their listings are currently hidden.
Optionally requires an active WooCommerce Subscription before listings can be restored, so the toggle can’t be used to sidestep an expired membership. Admins always bypass this, and on sites without WooCommerce Subscriptions there’s no restriction at all.
Adds a “Holiday mode” column to the Listings screen in wp-admin, so site owners can see which drafts are hidden by the plugin and what status each one returns to.
Shows an “Away on holiday” notice on the vendor’s public profile, so buyers know they may take longer than usual to reply. It uses HivePress’s own styling, so it looks native in any theme.
Never changes a listing’s expiry date, so holiday mode can’t be used to squeeze extra days out of a paid listing period.
Fully translatable, with a translation template included for Loco Translate or similar.
Cleans up after itself: if you delete the plugin while listings are hidden, they’re restored first, so nothing is left stranded as a draft.
I hope the community finds it useful. Future updates will be pushed straight to your WordPress dashboard via GitHub, so you can update it from the Plugins page like any other plugin. And as always, if you find any bugs or think of a cool new feature to add, drop a reply below.
Cheers,
Chris
P.S. If this extension saved you time or money, consider buying me a coffee! Sharing these tools for free takes a lot of time and resources, and your support helps me keep doing it for the community.
The update I mentioned above turned into a few of them, so here is everything new in one go.
New
Fresh notice design. Both notices are now clean information boxes with an icon: the banner vendors see on their account pages, and the away notice visitors see on a vendor’s profile. While a vendor is away, their profile no longer shows the “Listings by…” heading over an empty list, just one clear message. If you run the Messages extension, the standard wording lets visitors know they can still get in touch.
Full customisation. New settings under HivePress > Settings > Holiday Mode. For each notice you can set the label, the message, the icon (chosen from HivePress’s own icon list, with live previews) and the label, text, icon and background colours, all with a proper colour picker. The border shades itself to match whatever background you pick, and leaving any field blank keeps the standard design.
Vendors can write their own away message. Tick one box and every vendor gets a headline and text field under their Holiday mode switch. Their own words then appear on their profile, keeping your site’s icon and colours. Left blank, the site-wide message shows instead, and unticking the box brings every profile back to the site-wide message at once.
Example (what the vendor fills in, and what visitors see):
HivePress Memberships support. The restore check now recognises HivePress Memberships as well as WooCommerce Subscriptions, and only a vendor who actually holds one is ever gated. Everyone else switches holiday mode on and off freely.
Changed
Each listing’s own expiry date is always respected, so going on holiday never buys a listing extra visible time.
Restoring listings never spends Paid Listings submissions and never inflates Badges counts.
Deleting the plugin now keeps your settings unless you tick “Delete All Data” first, and it always restores hidden listings before anything else, so nothing is ever left stranded.
Update checks no longer send your site address or WordPress version anywhere.
Donate link - a quiet link on the Plugins screen, for anyone who would like to support the work.
Changed
Internal naming - the updater class and its file now carry a unique prefix so they can never clash with HivePress or a future official extension.
Consistent plugin details - the author now reads the same as the rest of my extensions, and the plugin link points at its source rather than my profile page.
Membership Gate Is Now Optional - Holding a vendor’s listings back over a lapsed HivePress Membership used to happen automatically. It is now a tick box under HivePress > Settings > Holiday Mode > Restoring Listings, and it arrives unticked on every site, including on upgrade. Tick it to keep the old behaviour.
New
Who Can Use Holiday Mode - Vendors plus anyone with a listing (how it has always worked), vendors only, or roles you tick yourself.
Statuses To Hide - Choose which of published, pending, private and scheduled get hidden. All four stay ticked after updating, and narrowing the list never strands listings that are already away.
Fixed
No More Being Trapped By An Unrelated Subscription - A lapsed WooCommerce Subscription could stop a vendor ending their holiday, even one bought for something with nothing to do with listings. That check is gone.
Binned Listings Stay Binned - A listing an admin removed during a holiday could put itself back live on the vendor’s next holiday.
Expired Listings Are Counted Separately - Listings whose own expiry passed while the vendor was away still stay hidden, as they always have, because a holiday must never buy a listing extra visible time. That count is now handed to Notifications for HivePress, which is what tells the vendor. Without that extension, Holiday Mode still shows nothing.
No False Activity Pop-Ups When A Holiday Ends - If you also run Social Proof for HivePress, it read every restored listing as a brand new one, so a vendor with twenty listings pushed twenty “just posted a new listing” pop-ups onto your site at once and buried the genuine activity. Coming back from holiday is now as quiet there as it already was in the badge and package counts.
Removing the plugin now also clears the update check’s own leftovers.
A %username% Token - Write something like “%username% is taking a break right now” and each vendor’s own display name appears in place of the token. It works in the site-wide wording you set and in the message a vendor writes for themselves.
Icon Size And Icon Weight - For the banner and the profile notice, so the icon can be made larger or heavier without any custom CSS. Leave them alone and the icons look exactly as they did.
Newer Font Awesome And Brand Icons - So you can use a logo where you used to be limited to the older set.
Changed
The Away Banner Can No Longer Be Dismissed - It is the only thing on screen saying a vendor’s listings are hidden, so closing it left them with nothing to explain why their listings had disappeared.
Icons Ship Inside The Plugin - Rather than being loaded from a third-party server, which is faster and keeps every request on your own site. Your chosen icon and settings are unaffected.
Shorter Settings Descriptions - With quick links to each section, separated sections, and explanations wrapped at a readable width.
Choose which plans block restoring - if you use “Membership Required to Restore”, you can now pick exactly which membership plans it applies to, so a lapsed plan you have not chosen never stands in a vendor’s way.
Every Font Awesome icon - the icon pickers now offer the whole free Font Awesome 7 set, brand icons included, which is around 800 more choices than before.
Changed
“Membership Required to Restore” now needs at least one plan - if you had it ticked, open HivePress > Settings > Holiday Mode > Restoring Listings and choose your plans to switch it back on. Until you do, the check does nothing.
Type to find an icon - the pickers search as you type rather than making you scroll a very long list, and every result still shows you the icon itself.
Lighter pages for your visitors - icons are drawn straight into the page instead of loading a font, so a visitor’s browser no longer downloads roughly 230 KB of stylesheet and font files just to show a few small pictures. Your colour, size and weight settings work exactly as before.
A faster settings screen - the icon choices are fetched as you search instead of every one of them being written into the page.
Shared icon library - Updated to the version that fixed two faults found in Account Menu Enhancer 3.4.0; neither could happen on this extension’s own screens and nothing here changes, but every extension now carries the corrected copy whichever one your site loads it from.
Live preview - A panel to the right of the settings draws the Vendor banner and the profile notice with the wording, icon, sizes and colours on the page, following every change as you make it; drag its edge to make it wider.
Changed
Chosen Roles - The list of roles is shown only while Offer the Switch To says Chosen roles, the one choice that reads it.
Fixed
The “Account → Settings” link in the Vendor banner showed stray characters around the arrow.
Download the latest version here
