GatherPress

A plain WordPress installation without any plugins reminds us of what WordPress used to be: a piece of software to run a personal blog. But WordPress’ extensibility is probably the reason for its success. If today, someone wants to post his events in a decent and serviceable way, likely one of the popular event plugins will get used. These are the event plugins the Event Bridge for ActivityPub plugin works with.

However, all of them lack either one of the following major issues:

• They come as a “freemium” package. If you want utilize features like advanced filtering, RSVP (attendee management), or apparently basic stuff like adding coordinates to your locations you have to pay.
• They lack tests and modern PHP coding style and their code base is nothing you want to spend your time on reading.
• Their feature set is too basic and non-pluggable.

GatherPress, a heavily developed, community-based event plugin, has none of the above issues, it does have one other problem, though: LLMs are co-authoring a lot of its code. And for those who know me personally, I keep my own LLM usage to an absolute minimum, not to mention the copyright issues. This started to annoy me that much, so I thought of completely abandoning my contributions to GatherPress and the work on the GatherPress ActivityPub companion plugin. I even sketched the beginnings of a made-by-humans WordPress event plugin that is much sleeker while still offering what small communities need. But that is another story…

Nevertheless, right now GatherPress is by far the best basis for building a stable, feature-complete event solution for the Fediverse together with the ActivityPub plugin. It makes features such as handling federated attendees, joining remote events, and messaging all attendees possible. If you’d like to read more about the technical reasons and design decisions behind this, let me know. I might give it a shot and write a more technical article about it.

Most importantly: GatherPress has an active welcoming community, if you want stay up to date follow @community@gatherpress.org.