Meetup.com -> GatherPress

Wanted to give everyone a heads up on where we’re at with moving away from Meetup.com. It’s something the community has talked about for years, and it comes at a cost of about $250,000 a year to the WordPress Community SupportWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. (WPCSWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016.), for a platform that doesn’t fully serve our needs.

Some of you may be aware, but for those that aren’t: we’re building around GatherPress, the open-source, community-built event plugin. It’s made by the WordPress community for the WordPress community. The plan is to use GatherPress as the foundation and build the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ pieces on top, contributing improvements back to the GatherPress pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. where possible and giving direct feedback otherwise.

@annezazu is wrangling people to carry this project forward, with early work from @dd32, alongside @patricia70, @mauteri, and the @GatherPress contributor community. This is the direction, not a finished plan yet, and we’ll share specifics as scope and timeline firm up.

If you organize events or want to help shape this, we’d love your thoughts in the comments.

The GatherPress team is always looking for new contributors to join the project. No contribution is too small, and your contribution doesn’t have to be code. Join #gatherpress in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.

GatherPress will have a table at WCUS, so that is a great time to meet the team and join the project if you’re interested.

Patricia BT 10:42 am on July 10, 2026

A huge thank you @karenalma, @annezazu and @dd32 for their work on integrating GatherPress with WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/.

If you’d like to contribute to this project, or if you’re a current MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organizer (whether you participated in previous GatherPress tests or not), please join us (see links on the above post) and leave a comment below!

We are excited for what’s to come
annezazu 5:34 pm on July 14, 2026

Thanks for announcing this and for all the effort up until this point! I wanted to follow up after chatting with @bor0 that his crew is going to dive into this work. This includes @mcliwanow, @akeda, @bor0, @kokkieh, @thilinah, and @raicem. Expect some combination of those folks to be involved and for that to be fleshed out further as they dig into what’s currently in place from @dd32 previously.
- annezazu 2:36 pm on July 15, 2026
  
  Even more good news, @alexodiy is also going to join the crew here working on this. Thank you for being game to help!
Felipe Velzani 7:27 pm on July 14, 2026

Very happy to see this project moving forward. 🙂
- vessels 7:06 am on July 16, 2026
  
  hello
Rocio Valdivia 2:19 pm on July 16, 2026

Love to see this moving forward with so much help!

Thanks everyone involved for making it happen and being so transparent about it 🙂
Amber Hinds 5:22 pm on July 17, 2026
I installed the GatherPress pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. on a test site and looked at it for a bit. As a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organizer who runs one of the largest (or possibly the largest) meetup groups, with higher average attendance than other groups, my initial impression of GatherPress is that it, alone, cannot replace Meetup.com. Or, it is going to need serious feature development before it can replace the features that make Meetup.com work well for organizers.
Here are the features that are vital:
- People can join a group so they get notified of relevant activity in the group.
- Organizers can create questions to ask people when they join the group.
- Email notifications sent to opted-in group members when an event is published.
- Event email reminders to people RSVPed yes or maybe. Meetup sends these automatically 7 days, 1 day, and a few hours before the event. See emails meetup sends here.
- Email notifications to RSVPed people if event information changes.
- The ability for organizers to mass email all members in a group. We currently send an email to all group members around the 1st of every month that promotes that month’s events. A significant percentage of our Zoom registrations come from the links in this email, not from the link on the event post itself. That tells me that people are relying on the email to learn about events and are not bothering to look at the website. If we have to rely on people coming to the website to see events, our attendee numbers will drop.
- The ability for attendees to rate and provide feedback on meetups. We find this feedback especially helpful as we’re planning future topics or deciding if we should ask a speaker back.
- Being able to create recurring events.
- Stats for organizers on group joins, total members, and event RSVPs. On Meetup.com you can view this data in a graph or download as a CSV for the past month, past 3 months, past year, or 3 years.
As far as I can tell, none of these features exist in GatherPress, and making the switch without them would hurt our group overall. I can open GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ issues for all of these, but I’m not sure if they should be opened for GatherPress or on the dot org repo.
Also, I have a broader question: has anyone tried to figure out how people are finding and joining Meetup groups and what roll the Meetup platform itself is playing?
I don’t think we should discount Meetup.com as a marketing channel. If we remove all groups from Meetup.com and list them only on WP.org, we lose the discoverability Meetup.com provides. It is possible that some people are going to Meetup.com and finding WordPress Meetups that way, not seeing them in their dashboard or on dot org. This is worth trying to study before discounting the platform. Perhaps the $250k is a valid marketing expense that helps people in tech and business owners discover or get more involved with WordPress.
- Patricia BT 5:35 pm on July 17, 2026
  
  Thank you so much @alh0319
  
  Recurring events are planned, and almost everything else belongs to the .org integration, and not the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party., so a test with standalone installation cannot show you what @dd32, @bor0 and the .org integration team are building.
  
  I agree with you, those features are necessary. We listed some of them in an old repository (not relevant anymore, it was before the integration was being worked on). Please @Bor0, tell us where we can add those now, on the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ repo? or any other way to share with your team? or have a look at them, some might not be relevant anymore.
  
  Many thx again for your help and insight.
webguybob 5:16 pm on July 18, 2026

This sounds great! How do I ensure that I get signed up for notifications of events when the WP GatherPress officially gets going? TIA! 🙂
Debabrata Karfa 1:34 pm on July 19, 2026

Thank you, team, for Gatherpress. 🙂

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