Scheduling plugin recommendations wanted

Hi,

I’m new to WordPress and am trying to help a local cat shelter set up an internal community page. This post got a bit long but I wanted to get as much relevant info as possible in there.

We are looking for a way to schedule volunteers and I have been reading a few “X Best WordPress scheduling …” etc. pages and skimmed the recommended plugin description pages but I find it very hard to understand based on that how they really work and if they provide the functionality we need. Installing each of them and testing seems like a very time consuming process so I’m keeping my fingers crossed hoping there might be some expertise around here to advice me.

What we have today (not at all WordPress) is a simple calendar view divided into two shifts per day every day of the week. Selecting a day activates a form where volunteers can sign up for either shift that day. Once a volunteer has signed up their name is added to the shift and this can be seen by all users checking the calendar.

This is used both to keep track of who will work when and by admins to verify that enough volunteers has signed up. Volunteers are also divided in three categories, “beginner”, “intermediate” and “experienced”. Which category you belong to is manually included in the calendar during sign up. This is important information for admins because each shift must have at least one experienced volunteer.

What we need:
– Signup page with calendar showing week or month view with all shifts
– Ability for admins to easily set up the two shifts per day
– Ability to have some shifts use other start/stop time than regular on special event days
– Ability for admins to change future shifts without breaking past shifts
– Ability for all registered users to sign up
– Ability for admins to verify that shifts are sufficiently signed up without having to use WordPress control panel features

Not essential but very helpful:
– Ability for all to see not only how many have signed up but also who and whether they are “beginner”, “intermediate” or “experienced”.
– Automated tagging of volunteer signup as “beginner”, “intermediate”, “experienced” based on user settings
– A nice summary of your own future shifts
– Automated email reminders for signed up shifts
– Simple administration that non-technical admins can handle

The plugin does not have to be free but as a non profit living on donations we would like to be fairly sure what we pay for is what we need.

The page we are setting up has not gone live yet. We currently have the plugin “Booking Activities” but without extensions it does not seem to meet our requirements and the extensions to it that might help seem focused on adding a lot of stuff we don’t really need. The biggest hurdle with “Booking Activities” so far is that the only way we see for admins to verify signups is with filters in the WordPress control panel which is both a bit technical and time consuming compared to our old solution where just looking at the calendar is enough.

Any advice on how to get the functionality we need out of “Booking Activities” or recommendations for other plugins that might suit us better would be greatly appreciated.