Frequently Asked Questions

PHP 8.1+, WordPress 6.0+, and MySQL 8.0+ (or MariaDB 10.6+). Any current shared-hosting plan that supports WordPress will work. See the full requirements page for details.

The easiest path is the one-click installer: upload sp-installer.php to a fresh WordPress site, visit yoursite.com/sp-installer.php, and it handles the rest. If you'd rather do it by hand, download the .zip from the download page, upload the plugin and each theme folder through your WordPress admin, activate the plugin first, then your chosen theme. Either way you'll land on the 3-step setup wizard.

Technically yes, but we don't recommend swapping in an unrelated theme. The plugin and the SocietyPress theme are built as a matched set — the theme is what displays the pages you build and applies your color and font choices, so a different theme means those pieces stop working together. If you're familiar with WordPress theme and plugin coding, the right path is to create a SocietyPress child theme and build from there — that keeps every integration intact while giving you full control to customize.

SocietyPress includes a CSV import tool with smart duplicate detection. Export your existing member list as a CSV file, map the columns to SocietyPress fields, and import. The system automatically detects organizational members based on name patterns.

No. The entire download is only about 8 MB, and it loads everything from your own site instead of pulling in outside code or heavy add-ons that bog a page down. It's built to stay fast even on inexpensive shared hosting.

Stripe and PayPal are both supported out of the box for dues, event registrations, and donations. You connect your own Stripe and/or PayPal accounts from the settings panel — no middleman takes a cut, and no payment data ever touches the SocietyPress project. Sandbox mode is supported for testing before you go live.

Sensitive fields (phone numbers, street addresses, dates of birth) are stored encrypted using the same modern security standard used by Signal and WhatsApp — even someone who gained access to your database wouldn’t be able to read them. Every admin screen verifies your identity and permissions before showing or saving anything. Email addresses on public pages are obfuscated to slow down scraping bots.

Yes. SocietyPress plugs into WordPress's built-in personal-data export and erasure tools. Members, event registrations, library loans, newsletter access, volunteer records, and donations all flow through the standard Tools > Export Personal Data and Tools > Erase Personal Data screens. Donations are pseudonymized on erasure rather than deleted — the dollar amount and date stay on the books for IRS recordkeeping; the name and contact information are wiped. See the Privacy & GDPR guide for the full walkthrough.

Yes. SocietyPress ships with 8 role templates (Webmaster, Membership Manager, Treasurer, Event Coordinator, Librarian, Communications Director, Records Manager, Content Editor) across 10 access areas. You can assign a template with one click, or toggle individual permissions per person. The Treasurer can record donations without seeing the membership roster; the Librarian can run the catalog without touching events. See the User Access & Roles guide for the full breakdown.

Yes. Settings > Export & Backup produces a single .zip containing a SQL dump of every SocietyPress table, a decrypted member export, and a README. Every byte your society put in comes back out. Your host's backup system handles the WordPress files and database — SocietyPress doesn't replace that, but it does make sure nothing important is trapped in a proprietary format. The Backup & Restore guide walks through the full export and restore flow.

Email deliverability is a WordPress-level concern, not SocietyPress-specific. For reliable delivery, install a free SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP, FluentSMTP) and point it at a transactional email service — Amazon SES, Postmark, or Mailgun all have free tiers that comfortably cover a society's volume. SocietyPress sends through wp_mail(), so any SMTP plugin works. The Email Setup guide has step-by-step recipes (15 minutes including coffee).

SocietyPress was designed with ENS societies in mind. Export your members as a CSV from ENS (SocietyPress supports the standard ENS export format directly), upload it through Members > Import, and the importer maps fields automatically, detects organizational members, and handles duplicates. Events, surname research, and library catalogs all have CSV importers too. See the ENS migration guide for the full walkthrough.

Today, SocietyPress is independently developed. The license is GPL, the code is public, and the long-term plan is to put the project under nonprofit stewardship — the GitHub organization name (SocietyPressFoundation) was chosen with that in mind.

The protection against bus-factor risk is also baked into the licensing model. Every line of code is public on GitHub, every release ships the full source, and any developer anywhere can fork the project and continue it. You also have a copy of every release sitting on your own server, which means a working SocietyPress site keeps working whether the project continues or not.

Honest answer: there is no paid SLA today. Support happens through the public community forums, the bug-report channel, and direct conversation on GitHub. A managed-hosting option with formal support is on the roadmap for societies that want a bill instead of a fork. In the meantime, the same GPL license that lets you read the code lets any WordPress developer in the world fix a bug for you — you are never locked in to one vendor's support queue.

Yes — and that is the trade. Early adopters get attention from the maintainer that later adopters will not. They get input into priorities. Their bug reports get fixed in days, not quarters. The live demo runs every feature against real settings every day, so what you see is what you get. The risk you are actually weighing is whether the platform you switch to is still going to exist in five years — and the answer to that question is in the GPL license, not in the customer count.

The version number is conservative on purpose. Every release ships the full feature set with no upgrade-locked tier — the 1.0 milestone is an internal threshold for "first society in production" rather than a feature gate. The changelog shows the actual rate of progress, and the demo shows the actual surface area. Don't read 1.0 as a ship date — read the changelog and the demo.

Today the SocietyPressFoundation GitHub organization is owned by the maintainer personally and acts as a holding pen. The explicit plan is to incorporate a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and transfer the project to it — the URL, repository, and trademarks were all chosen to make that handoff possible without forcing societies to re-migrate or re-link anything. In the meantime, the GPL license means the code is already public-good regardless of who holds the org.

Yes — self-hosting is a real responsibility, and we won't pretend otherwise. Most cPanel hosts run $5 to $10 a month and handle WordPress core updates automatically. SocietyPress itself ships a one-click installer and an in-app update checker so plugin and theme updates are a single button click. For societies who want none of that responsibility, the roadmap includes a managed hosting option where we handle every layer for a flat annual fee. The honest framing is: a few dollars a month for full control, or a higher fee for someone-else's-problem — both are legitimate choices.

Almost every WordPress compromise traces back to one of three things: an outdated installation, a sketchy third-party plugin, or a weak admin password. SocietyPress addresses all three: the in-app update checker keeps the plugin and theme current, the platform is built to ship as a single audited package rather than a kitchen-sink of unrelated plugins, and member data is encrypted at rest with XChaCha20-Poly1305 via libsodium. Open source actually makes security better, not worse: anyone can read every line, and anyone reporting a vulnerability follows the public disclosure policy at /security-policy/.