Earlier this year, the WordPress Community Team introduced a proposal to test GatherPress on the WordPress.org network as an alternative to Meetup. GatherPress is a community-driven event management plugin, led by Mike Auteri and Mervin Hernandez, designed to offer similar functionality to Meetup.com, but with a key difference: it’s built from the ground up by the WordPress community, specifically for the WordPress ecosystem.
In the proposal, Patricia BT, of the community team stressed the reason for this transition,” This initiative stems from our community’s need for an innovative event management tool tailored to the unique demands of WordPress event organizers and participants.”
Now, the team has provided an update on the project and the future roadmap. Given the positive reception the proposal received, development is progressing, and the team has requested feedback that will help refine the plugin further.
How You Can Contribute to the Development of GatherPress
The team is seeking input to help refine the plugin, and Patricia has outlined several ways for the community to get involved:
- Test GatherPress with WordPress Playground or install the plugin on your site.
- Meetup Organizers can test the plugin by publishing their Meetup events in the Demo site like how several WordPress Meetup groups are already doing.
- Community and Meta team members can help with the integration between GatherPress and the WordPress.org network
- You can also help by spreading the word, which will hopefully attract the required attention and, thereby, more users to test it.
Since its inception, GatherPress has seen several enhancements, such as customizable post types and taxonomy slugs with localized defaults, the addition of OpenStreetMap, and more. Interested folks can also help translate the plugin.
The future roadmap includes the addition of new features such as recurring event management, email notification when the event starts, and more.
The Benefits of Transitioning to GatherPress
Compared to other platforms, GatherPress offers several key advantages, particularly in its approach to data management. As per the proposal, the following are the advantages:
- Members and Attendance data lives on your website and database. Community Organizers define privacy policies, selectively publish attendee lists, gather additional data from attendees, etc.
- Democratized access to data and functionality, as WordPress is customizable
- Open Source: free, and scaled with WordPress
GatherPress will have a dedicated table at WordCamp US on the Contributor Day on September 17, 2024. The feedback should be provided before the end of September 2024, and if you are interested you can join the team and discussions on GatherPress Slack or GitHub.