About SocietyPress
Built by a society volunteer for society volunteers. Free, open source, and meant to stay that way.
Why This Exists
Genealogical and historical societies rely on volunteers — people working evenings and weekends, often with inadequate tools. Memberships tracked in spreadsheets. Event plugins awkwardly adapted for meetings. SaaS platforms costing hundreds per year still overlook surname research databases.
SocietyPress began from frustration with this gap. Every administrator reinvented roster management, dues tracking, event calendars, newsletter archives, cemetery transcription publishing — and paid for it.
Too often, important needs go unmet. Genealogical and historical societies face unique challenges that require software solutions tailored to their needs. SocietyPress is developed once, shared collectively, and made freely available so every group can access and benefit from the right tools without barriers.
Mission
SocietyPress exists to give every genealogical and historical society — no matter how small, no matter how broke — the same caliber of website and membership tools as the largest national organizations, without ever charging for it.
Who's Behind It
Charles Stricklin
Creator, developer, and lead maintainer.
Charles is a software developer and genealogist in Texas with a BBA in Business Information Systems from Mississippi State University. Everything SocietyPress is his own work, start to finish — designed, coded, documented, and maintained by one person who cares that the result is right.
He speaks about society technology at community events and writes every line of SocietyPress himself — though the plugin's design choices, feature priorities, and rough edges all come from sustained conversation with society administrators who are actually running the thing.
Charles also serves as Chairman of the Education Committee at the San Antonio Genealogical & Historical Society — a volunteer role unrelated to SocietyPress. SAGHS did not fund, sponsor, or contribute to this project. SocietyPress is his independent work, built on his own time with his own resources; SAGHS has no ownership, control, or financial interest in it.
Speaking & Community
- TSGS Leadership Conference 2026 Speaker and vendor — August 29, 2026
- RootsTech 2027 Target launch milestone — Salt Lake City, March 3–7, 2027
Why Open Source
SocietyPress is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. In practical terms, that means three things that matter:
- No paywall, ever. There is no “Pro” version, no premium tier, no locked features, no trial expiration. Everything SocietyPress does is in the free download, and it always will be.
- No vendor lock-in. The code is public on GitHub. Your data is yours to export in standard formats at any time. If SocietyPress ever stopped being developed tomorrow, your site would keep running on whatever host you chose, and your data would still be portable.
- Legal protection. The GPL license is legally binding. The code stays open, past versions remain free forever, and the license guarantees future versions will too. Anyone — including us — is free to fork SocietyPress and keep it going, so the project can never be closed off.
Donations are always welcome and never required. They fund continued development, server costs, and conference attendance — nothing more and nothing less.
Where We're Headed
The plugin hit feature completeness in early 2026. The work ahead is in three broad arcs:
- Documentation. Comprehensive written guides, video walkthroughs, and migration guides — especially for societies coming from EasyNetSites (ENS), which is the most common platform SocietyPress replaces.
- Adoption. Getting SocietyPress into the hands of more societies — starting with the roughly 170 active ENS societies that are looking for a successor, and expanding from there. This is why RootsTech 2027 matters.
- Polish. Store checkout, records imports, cleaning up the last i18n gaps, and whatever else shakes out from societies actually running SocietyPress in production and telling us what hurts.
Join In
Download SocietyPress, try the demo, read the documentation, or reach out directly. We'd love to hear from your society.