AstroWay – Astrology, Birth Chart & Horoscope Widgets

Description

Paste one shortcode into a page and the horoscope is on it: real text, in your theme’s own fonts and colours, inside the HTML that search engines read. No frame, no JavaScript, no account, no API key, no credit card.

Three steps to the first widget

1. Install and activate. There is nothing to configure and nothing to sign up for.
2. Paste this into any post or page: [astroway_daily_horoscope sign="leo"]
3. Open the page. The reading is there, styled like the rest of your content.

The moon phase takes no parameters at all, [astroway_moon_phase]. A birth chart takes a date, a time and a place:

[astroway_natal date="1990-05-15" time="14:30" lat="50.45" lon="30.52" tz="Europe/Kyiv"]

AstroWay → Shortcodes in your admin lists every shortcode with its parameters and a copy button, next to a city search that fills in coordinates and timezone for you. Every one of them is a Gutenberg block as well: type /astroway in the editor and the preview shows the finished card, not a placeholder.

What needs a key

• Nothing at all: daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, moon phase, Tarot card of the day, planet of the day, the natal chart with its reading, the Human Design bodygraph, the moon sign, the rising sign, synastry, the four sky cards (Mercury retrograde, all retrogrades, void of course Moon, planetary hours), the yearly horoscope, sign compatibility, the Chinese animal and the birth-data calculators. On first use the plugin asks api.astroway.info for a key of the site’s own, proving it owns its address; there is nothing to sign up for. The site gets 300 readings an hour, and each answer is cached until the data changes.
• A free key, no card: 10,000 credits a month. It adds the 680 generated shortcodes. Most calls cost 10 credits.
• A paid plan, from $5 a month: more credits and a higher rate limit for busy sites. The daily transit alert email needs the Pro plan.

What renders into the page

Eleven widgets are rendered by your own server directly into the page: daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, moon phase, Tarot card of the day (Rider-Waite deck), planet of the day, the natal chart, the Human Design bodygraph, the moon sign, the rising sign and the synastry between two charts. Their text is part of your HTML, so search engines index it, screen readers announce it, and it inherits your theme’s fonts and colours instead of sitting in a frame that ignores them. The natal chart’s wheel, its aspect grid and its element matrix are drawn into the page as well, in the same colours as the text around them. Each answer is cached until the underlying data actually changes, so a page carrying all twelve signs spends twelve requests a day rather than twelve an hour. This runs on the anonymous per-site allowance of 300 requests an hour, with no key and no account.

What the sky is doing right now

Four cards answer the questions people search for rather than calculate: is Mercury retrograde, what else is retrograde, is the Moon void of course, and which planetary hour is it. [astroway_mercury_retrograde] prints yes or no, the dates of the retrograde it is in or heading for, and how many days are left. [astroway_retrogrades] does the same for all eight planets that station, as one table. [astroway_moon_voc] lists the void windows with their last aspect and next sign. [astroway_planetary_hours latitude="50.45" longitude="30.52"] prints the twenty-four hours of the day with the one you are in marked. Station and window times are printed on your site’s clock, not in UTC, which matters more often than it sounds: Saturn turns direct at 23:31 UTC on 10 December, and that is the 11th anywhere east of Greenwich. They run on the site’s own key, which the plugin asks for by itself.

Calculators for your visitors

Leave the date out and a card asks for it. [astroway_natal], [astroway_moon_sign] and [astroway_rising_sign] with no birth date show a short form: date, time, and the city, found by name with its coordinates and time zone. The answer is drawn on the same page by your server, so the form works without JavaScript. Without a birth time the natal chart leaves out houses and the Ascendant rather than guessing noon, the moon sign names both signs on a day the Moon changed sign, and the rising sign says plainly that it needs the time. The plugin keeps nothing a visitor types: the answer is not cached and the page is sent no-store and noindex.

What a natal chart means

Under the chart, each planet in its sign has its reading: edited texts from AstroWay’s own astrologer, in the site’s language, one row per planet. Planet in house and the aspects follow as they are written, and a row simply does not appear until its text exists.

680 more, for when you need them

Eighteen widgets are hand-built and need no key. Behind them the plugin also carries a shortcode and a block for 680 more endpoints: Vedic charts and dashas, four kinds of numerology, three tarot decks, BaZi, Zi Wei Dou Shu, Human Design, geomancy, runes, Mayan calendars, astrocartography, horary, and the Hellenistic traditions. AstroWay → Shortcodes lists them by family with a copy button on each. They are generated from the API specification rather than written one by one, so when the API gains an endpoint the plugin gains a shortcode. These need an API key; a free key comes with 10,000 credits a month, and most calls cost 10 of them.

The year, two signs, and the Chinese animal

Three cards read the signs themselves. The yearly horoscope, [astroway_yearly_horoscope sign="leo"], prints the year ahead. [astroway_zodiac_compatibility sign1="leo" sign2="aquarius"] prints how two signs read together, as prose rather than as a percentage: the API returns no score, and a number with no calculation behind it is worse than no number. [astroway_chinese_zodiac date="1990-05-15"] prints the animal of a birth year with its element, polarity and pillar.

Two charts, read against each other

The synastry card, [astroway_synastry name_a="Olena" date_a="1990-05-15" time_a="14:30" name_b="Marc" date_b="1988-11-02" time_b="09:15"], prints the compatibility score, the word the API puts on it, and the aspects behind it as a table headed by the two names, because “Moon conjunct Mercury” says nothing until you know whose Moon. The six closest are shown and the whole grid, points included, is one click away. A birth time you do not have is declared unknown rather than guessed at noon, which would move the Moon by up to six degrees and invent an aspect that is not there. The names never leave your server. No key needed; one of these counts as three requests of the hourly allowance, because it is two charts and the grid between them.

Tabs, without the JavaScript

Put several AstroWay blocks inside an Astrology Section and set its layout to Tabs. Your server still renders every card, one after another, and a 3 KB script folds that stack into a proper tab strip with arrow-key navigation. Turn JavaScript off and the page is the stack it always was, with every word still in the HTML: nothing is fetched in the browser and nothing is hidden from a crawler. Tab labels drop the words they all share, so four horoscopes for one sign read “today”, “the week”, “the month” and “the year”.

An email when the sky does something

Turn on daily transit alerts under AstroWay → Settings and your site emails you on the days a planet stations or the Moon goes void of course, with the current retrogrades and the moon phase for context. Nothing is sent on the quiet days, which is the point: a message every morning is a newsletter, and this is an alert. Pick the hour on your own clock and who it goes to. Part of the Pro plan.

One sign for a whole section

The Astrology Section block sets a zodiac sign once and every AstroWay block inside it follows: four horoscopes on a sign’s landing page, and the sign is written in one place rather than four. A block that has its own sign keeps it.

What still loads in a frame

Widgets that have no page-side template yet, and any widget whose data cannot be fetched at that moment, fall back to an embedded frame loaded by the visitor’s own browser (30 requests/hour per visitor IP). Eighteen widgets need no key of any kind, and that is where most sites stop. The generated shortcodes behind them need one: a free key gives 10,000 credits a month, most calls cost 10, and paid plans raise the limits further. The daily transit alert email is the only thing in the plugin that asks for a paid plan.

Under the hood the widgets are powered by api.astroway.info, with 700+ endpoints covering Western, Vedic, Hellenistic, Chinese and Mayan astrology, Tarot (Rider-Waite, Marseille, Lenormand), Numerology (Pythagorean, Chaldean, Kabbalistic, Tamil), Human Design and AI horoscopes.

Try it before you install

The same calculations run as free web tools, with no install and no account: a birth chart and a synastry comparison. Useful for seeing what a widget will output before you put a shortcode on a page.

External services

This plugin connects to api.astroway.info, the AstroWay Calculation API operated by the AstroWay Team, to render astrology widgets and tarot readings, and to app.astroway.info, operated by the same team, to find a city’s coordinates for the birth data forms. Apart from the site key request described below, no external request is made until a widget is rendered on a page where one of the plugin’s shortcodes or Gutenberg blocks is used.

What is sent:

• When a widget your server renders into the page is refreshed (daily, weekly and monthly horoscope, moon phase, daily tarot, planet of the day, natal chart, Human Design bodygraph, moon sign, rising sign, synastry): the parameters provided in the shortcode (zodiac sign, or date, time, latitude and longitude) plus your site’s own address, sent so the request is counted against your site’s allowance. Names given to the synastry widget are not among them: they head the table on your page and go no further. The request is made by your server, not by the visitor’s browser, so the visitor’s IP address is not sent at all, and it is only made when the cached answer has expired.
• When a widget falls back to an embedded frame (kundli, panchang, transit, numerology, the Marseille and Lenormand tarot decks, and any widget whose data could not be fetched): the visitor’s browser loads that frame directly from api.astroway.info, so the parameters in the shortcode and the visitor’s IP address reach the service, the latter for anonymous rate-limiting. Nothing about that visitor passes through your server.
• When a visitor sends a birth data form (natal chart, moon sign, rising sign): the date, time and coordinates they entered go to api.astroway.info, and the city name they typed goes to app.astroway.info to look up its coordinates and time zone. Both requests are made by your server; the visitor’s IP address is not sent, and the answer is not stored.
• When the site has no API key of its own: your site’s address and the plugin version go to api.astroway.info to request a site key. The service then fetches a one-time proof from your site’s REST route /astroway/v1/verify to confirm the site is yours. This runs in the background after activation and when an administrator opens the dashboard, until a key is issued.
• When the site administrator clicks “Verify Key” or “Test Connection” in the Settings screen: the configured API key and a small diagnostics payload.

When this happens:

• On frontend page render (only on pages where an AstroWay shortcode or block is present), and when a visitor sends a birth data form.
• In the background after activation and on the dashboard, only to request the site key while the site has none.
• On explicit admin action (Verify, Test Connection, Purge Cache).

Nothing is sent on deactivation.

• Service URL: https://api.astroway.info/v1/
• Terms of Service: https://api.astroway.info/terms
• Privacy Policy: https://api.astroway.info/privacy
• City search: https://app.astroway.info/api/atlas/search, Terms of Service: https://app.astroway.info/terms, Privacy Policy: https://app.astroway.info/privacy

Privacy

This plugin stores the following on the WordPress site:

• The site administrator’s API key (if entered), stored in the wp_options table under astroway_settings. Visible only to users with manage_options capability.
• WP transient cache of API responses (prefix astroway_v1_) to reduce repeat external calls. Cache contents are chart/horoscope/tarot output, no visitor PII beyond what was submitted via shortcode arguments. Purged via Settings → AstroWay → Purge Cache.
• The site key the plugin was issued, encrypted, under astroway_site_key_<host>.
• For the birth data forms’ rate limit: a salted hash of each sender’s IP address with a count of their submissions, under astroway_form_hits, cleared ten minutes later on the next submission and removed on uninstall. What the visitor typed is not stored.

This plugin does not set any cookies on visitor browsers, does not use third-party tracking, and does not transmit visitor data to anyone other than api.astroway.info and, for the city search, app.astroway.info (see External services above).

Technical details