Genealogical and historical societies preserve something irreplaceable. Cemetery transcriptions nobody else will ever do. Newsletter archives going back forty years. Member rolls, surname research files, and meeting minutes that, if not carried forward by someone, simply disappear.
The volunteers who keep these societies running deserve software that respects the work.
That’s why SocietyPress exists.
What it is
SocietyPress is a free, open-source website platform built specifically for genealogical and historical societies. It runs on WordPress under the hood, but you don’t need to know that to use it. Once installed, you’re working in a clean, purpose-built admin designed around how a society actually operates.
It does everything a society website needs to do:
- Member management with tiers, renewals, dues, and a self-service portal that members can use without bothering you
- Events, registrations, waitlists, and online payments
- A research library with an OPAC-style catalog, automatic cover images, and a full search interface
- Genealogical record collections (cemetery indexes, census transcriptions, obituary indexes) with frontend search and per-collection access controls
- Newsletter archives with built-in PDF viewers
- Volunteer signups and hours tracking
- Online donations through Stripe and PayPal, including recurring giving
- A built-in store for publications and merchandise
- Online voting and elections
- Lineage program rosters and printable certificates
- Surname research databases with phonetic search
- A drag-and-drop page builder so you can shape your pages without touching code
- Full GDPR compliance, member data encryption, and access controls
Everything connects. Members log in once. Admins manage the whole society from one place.
What it costs
Nothing. Not freemium. Not a free trial. Not free-but-we-sell-your-data.
The code is on GitHub. The license is GPL. You install it on your own WordPress hosting, typically $5 to $15 a month, which most societies already pay for, and it’s yours forever. No invoices, no renewals, no platform that can change terms on you next quarter.
Self-hosted means you own your data and your site. If you ever want to move hosts, you move. If you want to change something, you can. SocietyPress runs on standard WordPress on your own server. Your records stay where you put them, in a database you control.
Who it’s for
SocietyPress is for the volunteer who somehow ended up running their society’s website without asking for the job: the secretary who knows spreadsheets but has never thought of themselves as “technical,” the board member who got “voluntold,” the new webmaster inheriting a tangle of half-working tools. Every design decision starts there. If a feature wouldn’t make sense to a non-technical volunteer, we re-did it.
What’s coming
SocietyPress 1.0 brings every feature you need to run a society site. We’re still polishing the onboarding video, the documentation library, and one-click installation through hosts that offer it. Those will land soon.
What to do next
- Try the demo at demo.getsocietypress.org. Log in, click around, and see whether your society would feel at home in it.
- Browse the features list to see the full picture.
- Have questions? The feedback form goes straight to the maintainer.
Kick the tires, drive it around the block, and let us know what you think.