Description
Gather Grove Communities gives your members a place to talk to each other, on your own site, under your own name. It is built for studios and small creative businesses (yoga, pilates, martial arts, ceramics, dance, music schools, wellness practices) rather than as a generic forum: rooms are calm, every privacy default is conservative, and the wording follows your studio’s own words.
What you get:
- Rooms. Open rooms anyone can join, membership rooms you add people to, and rooms people apply to join (with Gather Grove Forms). Room templates (Discussion, Announcements, Class room, Resource library, Request board, Front porch) start each one already set up, and each room picks a layout.
- Conversation. Posts and threaded replies, a calm set of reactions, announcements, proposals your members can support, pasted-link previews, @mentions, and search across posts and replies.
- Campfires. A live chat with a beginning and an end: light one for launch night, office hours or the hour after a workshop. Pin what matters, and the pins are kept as a post when the fire goes out.
- Intro rituals. New members introduce themselves with a short post pinned at the top of a room, and everyone else can welcome them.
- Materials and links. Each room has two shelves, for files and for links, which the people who run the room fill and order from inside the room.
- Public rooms, if you want them. Every room is private unless you decide otherwise. Make one public and it gets a calm, indexable page and a sitemap entry, showing only what was written to be shared.
- Members can propose rooms. Switch it on and members propose rooms that wait for your approval. Instructors linked through Gather Grove Booking can start their own rooms.
- Membership and moderation. Roles (member, moderator, instructor), invitations sent from inside a room, per-room mute, ban with a reason, and held-back posts for moderated rooms.
- Member profiles and an activity feed. Members choose what their profile shows and who sees it. An optional member directory, which members opt into one by one.
- An app on your members’ phones. Members can add the community to their home screen, with an offline page.
- Notification choices. Each member sets how much they hear from each room, and how often an email digest arrives.
- Your words. Call your rooms “Circles” or your members “Students”, and every page follows.
- Elementor widgets. Activity Feed, Space Card, Member Directory, Member Intro Block, Live Campfire and Controls.
- Privacy built in. Deleting a member’s account removes what is personal to them, and a roster review screen asks you what to do when someone leaves your staff.
Part of the Gather Grove suite
Gather Grove Communities is one part of Gather Grove, a family of plugins for running and growing a creative business on your own WordPress site. The plugins share one admin, one list of people, and one look:
- Gather Grove Booking — classes, appointments and events, with online payment. Members see their rooms on their Booking dashboard, and class activity reaches the feed.
- Gather Grove Courses — online courses with a lesson player. Members can share a lesson note with their group.
- Gather Grove Forms — forms and applications. Ask people to apply before they join a room.
- Gather Grove Pulse — email broadcasts, automated sequences and a contact list that knows who booked, joined or enrolled.
- Gather Grove Companion — an AI assistant for your admin, and a chat helper for your visitors.
Learn more at gathergrove.io.
Free and Professional
Everything listed above is free, and stays free. The free plugin has no locked features, never expires, and is not a trial.
Gather Grove Communities Professional is a separate plugin, available from gathergrove.io, that adds class, course and member-messaging features. Compare the two at gathergrove.io/docs/pricing.
External services
This plugin can connect to the following services. None of them is contacted unless you use the feature that needs it.
YouTube, Vimeo and other oEmbed providers — when a member pastes a YouTube, Vimeo or other link into a post, WordPress’s oEmbed system asks that provider for the preview, and the provider’s player then loads from its own servers when someone views the post. The viewer’s browser connects to the provider, which receives their IP address and whatever the provider’s player collects.
YouTube terms of service: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
Google privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
Vimeo terms of service: https://vimeo.com/terms
Vimeo privacy policy: https://vimeo.com/privacy
Web push services (Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft) — when a member turns on phone notifications, their browser registers with its own push service, and your site sends each notification to that service for delivery. A notification carries a short title, a one-line note such as “Ada mentioned you”, and a link — never the post itself. The push service receives it with the member’s browser subscription address, and with your site’s admin email address, which the web push standard requires as a contact for the sending site. Nothing is sent unless a member turns notifications on.
Google privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
Mozilla privacy policy: https://www.mozilla.org/privacy/
Apple privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/
Microsoft privacy statement: https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement
Postmark — used to send your site’s email through your own Postmark account, only after you connect one under Gather Grove Settings Email delivery. When connected, your server sends Postmark your key, your sending domain (to register it and check its DNS records), and each email it is asked to send: sender, recipients, subject, body and any attachments. If you also switch on “Send all your site’s email through Postmark”, every email your site sends goes this way. Postmark then posts delivery, bounce, open, click, spam-complaint and unsubscribe reports back to a secret address on your site. Nothing is sent unless you connect an account.
Terms of service: https://postmarkapp.com/terms-of-service
Privacy policy: https://postmarkapp.com/privacy-policy
Screenshots
Installation
- Install Gather Grove Communities from the Plugins screen, or upload the
gather-grove-communitiesdirectory to/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate it through the Plugins screen.
- Open Gather Grove Communities in the admin sidebar. Under Settings, press “Create starter spaces” for a welcome room and a question room to begin with.
- Your community lives at
/community/on your site.
FAQ
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Where is my community’s data kept?
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In your own WordPress database, in tables belonging to this plugin. Nothing is sent to our servers.
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Do I need the other Gather Grove plugins?
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No. Communities is complete on its own. The other plugins are there if your studio grows into them: Booking adds class activity and instructor links, Courses adds course discussions, Forms adds applications.
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Do I need Elementor?
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No. The community pages work with any theme. Elementor adds widgets for placing parts of the community on your own pages.
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Is anything public?
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Only what you choose. Every room is private by default, member profiles show only what each member chooses, and the member directory is off until you switch it on and members opt in.
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What happens to my community if I delete the plugin?
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Nothing, by default. Deleting the plugin leaves your rooms, posts and profiles in place, so reinstalling restores them. To remove that data too, turn on the delete-data switch under Gather Grove Communities Settings before you delete the plugin.
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Does it change anything about my site’s login or security?
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Two small protections are on by default, shared by every Gather Grove plugin. Visitors who are not logged in can no longer read your site’s list of account names (WordPress normally publishes it at /wp-json/wp/v2/users and through ?author= links). And after 10 failed logins from one address in 15 minutes, that address has to wait before trying again. Logged-in editors are not affected, and sites behind Cloudflare are recognised automatically. If you already use a security plugin, or need the public account list, return false from the
gather_grove/security/throttle_loginsorgather_grove/security/hide_user_listfilter to turn either off.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Gather Grove Communities” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Gather Grove Communities” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.77.2
- Security: room and profile styles now load as regular stylesheets instead of inline CSS, and data handed to the page’s scripts is encoded so it can never close a script tag.
- Fixed: deleting the plugin with “remove data” on now removes only options whose names start with the plugin’s own prefix. Before, it could also remove another plugin’s option that happened to contain the same words.
- Updated the shared Gather Grove core to 0.76.1.
1.77.1
- Fixed: the Communities card on the Gather Grove dashboard and in the WordPress Dashboard widget now shows active spaces, members and posts this week, with a link to manage spaces. Before, the widget’s card was empty and the dashboard page printed a stray line of text.
1.77.0
- New: paste the address of a video or audio file on its own line in a post and it plays right there, in the same Gather Grove player your courses use, with playback speed and keyboard controls. YouTube and Vimeo links work as before.
- Updated the shared Gather Grove core to 0.74.0.
1.76.0
- Changed: community pages, rooms, campfires, profiles and invitation pages now load their styles and scripts the standard WordPress way, so caching and optimisation plugins can see and handle them.
- Changed: the WordPress Dashboard widget’s styles now apply only inside the widget, and no longer touch the rest of the Dashboard.
- Changed: every REST endpoint now states its permission check where it is registered. Nothing changes for members or admins.
- Fixed: the controls shortcode’s output is filtered through the plugin’s HTML allow-list.
- Fixed: the plugin’s homepage link now points to gathergrove.io/plugins/communities/.
- For developers: the composer script is now
assets/js/composer.js(handlegather-grove-communities-composer). If you use Elementor, clear its cache after updating.
1.75.2
- Fixed: in the community’s recent activity, a reply now reads as a reply — “Tomas replied to Maren’s post” — showing what they wrote, with the original post quoted underneath. Before, a reply looked like a second copy of the post written by the person who replied.
- Fixed: the “a campfire is live” banner inside a room now matches the one on the community page, with space before the next heading. On some sites it showed as a plain blue link.
- Fixed: in a room’s “In this room” list, a name with a Moderator badge shows in full; the badge moves under the name when both don’t fit.
- Fixed: room descriptions on the community page no longer look double-spaced, and the campfire icon stays beside a room’s name instead of dropping onto a line of its own.
- Fixed: in a campfire, “Remove” on your own message now sits beside your name, so your message and its reactions stay together.
- New: a public room page now shows your site’s logo (or mark) and name at the top, linking back to your home page.
- Fixed: dates in the admin — requested spaces, invitations and the activity inspector — now show in your site’s own date, time format and timezone.
- Fixed: the Settings help text now names Feed-first as the default community page style, which it has been since 1.18.0. Nothing changes on your site.
1.75.1
- Fixed: when another Gather Grove plugin adds something to the side of your community pages (such as Booking’s “Next class” strip), its styling now loads properly again. In 1.75.0 the styling showed up as plain text beside it.
1.75.0
- New on every site: public rooms, member-created rooms, the Materials and Links shelves, campfires and intro rituals. Any open or membership room can have a public page, members can propose rooms, room staff can fill a room’s shelves, hosts can light a campfire, and members can post an intro.
- New: a “When the plugin is deleted” switch under Settings. Turn it on before deleting the plugin to remove everything Communities stored; by default your community stays in place.
- Fixed: on block themes such as Twenty Twenty-Five, community pages framed by your theme show its header and footer without WordPress logging “deprecated” notices.
- For developers: every option, admin action, query variable, script handle, constant and JavaScript global now uses the full
gather_grove_communities_prefix (wasgg_communities_), and the controls shortcode is[gather_grove_communities_controls]. Your settings move across on their own the first time the site loads after the update, the old shortcode is rewritten in your pages, and old invitation and search links still work. Tables, capabilities and stored widget data keep their names.