We were invited to give regular updates about GatherPress.
Here are the advancements made by GatherPress since our initial proposal from January 2024 and our update from September 2024.
The GatherPress team has continued working toward the goal of testing GatherPress as a potential alternative for managing WordPress community events.
After several months of back-and-forth discussions with the Meta team, we’ve learned that integration with WordPress.org services (like user accounts or event listings) won’t be considered until the tool has been tested with real-world events. The technical tests that were requested in June 2024 and ran until the autumn provided a useful foundation, but they were not enough for the Meta team to properly evaluate GatherPress in a live setting.
To unblock the project and continue progressing, the GatherPress team has adjusted the approach. The next steps will be:
- Run a real-world trial with a few selected local communities hosting events via GatherPress.
- Use a self-hosted installation of GatherPress (hosting generously provided by Robotstxt.es) while waiting for potential .org integration. BuddyPress will also be installed on that instance. It’s a continuation of the previous test installation and all existing testing groups are welcome to participate.
- We will start this new test phase as soon as we release GatherPress 0.33.0 and a new theme is developed by GatherPress team members.
Juan Hernando (@unintended8) is now overseeing the project for the Community Team, following the departure of the previous contributors involved.
What this means
Pros:
- We move forward with actual testing using live events.
- We collect feedback and usage data based on real organizer and attendee experiences, as well as input and needs from the Community Team, to support future scaling to more groups.
Cons:
- As integration with WordPress.org won’t be in place for now, an activity update about organizing or speaking at an event won’t appear on WordPress.org profiles. This is already the case with Meetup, but one of the future goals of GatherPress on WordPress.org would change that and address invisible contributions for organizers.
- Events won’t appear in the Events Widget in WordPress dashboards or on https://events.wordpress.org unless the Meta team is able to support discoverability in the interim. We’re open to collaborating on a solution, such as providing an API to support this. In the meantime, organizers can still publish their events on Meetup.com, linking to the ones on the new platform.
We hope that some minimal integration can still be explored to increase event visibility, even while the project remains self-hosted for now.
Latest version and features
The newly released version 0.32.x of GatherPress introduces a complete overhaul of the RSVP block system. This redesign allows organisers to design the RSVP block and its inner block such as modal per RSVP status with flexibility.
Upcoming
In upcoming releases starting with 0.33.0, new options will include:
- RSVP by email handshake: attendees enter their email, receive a confirmation link, and confirm attendance without creating an account.
- RSVP via Fediverse: attendees can confirm their presence using their Fediverse identity.
- Events will optionally be federated with the event format to appear on the Fediverse
- Rewrite of the calendar block
- RSVP management screen
Those options are designed to make participation simpler and more privacy-conscious, whether events are hosted independently or eventually on WordPress.org.
What’s next
We’ll be supporting a handful of groups as they start running their meetups on the self-hosted version of GatherPress. The results will help assess how the tool performs in practical use and inform any next steps for broader testing or eventual integration.
If your community is interested in taking part in this pilot phase, or if you have feedback or questions, please leave a comment or join the discussion in the #gatherpress channel on Slack. Development continues to be led by a group of contributors. We welcome new developers, testers, and organizers, as well as feedback of any form. You can participate in our weekly huddles on Fridays at 15:00 UTC. The upcoming huddles are always listed on the homepage of our website.
You can follow progress or explore the tool on GitHub, or launch it in a WordPress Playground instance.
The long-term goal remains to provide a fully integrated, community-owned alternative for event management on WordPress.org.
If you are attending WordCamp Europe 2025, you can connect with me (Patricia) for any question about the GatherPress project.
Thank you to everyone who continues to contribute to and support the GatherPress project!
The GatherPress Team
Written and reviewed by @patricia70, @mauteri, @malgra, @javiercasares and @blitz128 from the GatherPress team and contributors.
Reviewed by @unintended8, @_dorsvenabili
Many thanks!
#meetups, #community-management, #community-events, #community-team, #learn, #meta, #meta-wordcamp