HappenBoard

Description

HappenBoard is a modern, lightweight events calendar and appointment-booking plugin, built from the ground up for the WordPress block editor and the Site Editor. It uses only core WordPress components, server-rendered blocks, and clean PSR-4 PHP 8.2 code.

It is built by the team behind SEOPress and MailerPress, with the same focus on speed, native integration, and a generous free tier.

Why HappenBoard

• Fast and SEO-friendly out of the box. Server-rendered blocks load instantly and are indexed by Google — no JavaScript-only pages that hurt your rankings.
• Works with your theme. Native blocks adapt to your design without custom CSS, and Site Editor templates let you redesign every event page visually.
• Stop losing attendees. Free RSVPs with capacity limits, email confirmations, automatic reminders, and a one-click cancellation link, everything your visitors need to actually show up.
• Real recurring events. Weekly classes, monthly meetups, yearly conferences — set it once and HappenBoard handles every occurrence.
• Take appointments too. A full booking flow in the free plugin: booking types, per-host weekly availability with buffers and notice windows, days off, round-robin assignment across unlimited hosts, group bookings, a standards-compliant .ics invite attached to every confirmation, and a token link so visitors cancel or reschedule themselves.
• Get found on Google. Event Schema (JSON-LD) is added automatically so your events appear in Google’s rich event results.
• Move in without retyping anything. One-click importers for The Events Calendar, Events Manager, Sugar Calendar, EventKoi, Amelia, and any .ics file — they even work when the old plugin is already deactivated.
• No lock-in, no clutter. Standard custom post types, REST API, and iCal feeds — your data stays yours and works with any tool.
• Familiar admin. The same look and feel as WordPress core, so your team doesn’t need to learn a new interface.

Also in the free plugin

• 21 blocks, 11 patterns, and Site Editor templates for single events, the events archive, category archives, single booking types, and the per-event “All dates” page
• Weather forecast on event pages, for outdoor events (optional, powered by Open-Meteo)
• Favourites and a personal “My schedule” so visitors can save the events they care about
• Multilingual — WPML and Polylang, through the bundled wpml-config.xml
• GDPR-native — real WordPress personal-data exporter and eraser, not just a settings page
• Spam protection — honeypot and signed timestamps by default, optional Cloudflare Turnstile and Akismet
• Site Health checks that tell you when a cron failure is about to stop your reminders
• REST API for every entity, WP-CLI commands for event creation and migrations, plus an Elementor widget for classic-builder sites

Built the WordPress way

• PHP 8.2+ with strict types and PSR-4 autoloading
• Vendor libraries (sabre/vobject) prefixed with Strauss — no conflict with any other plugin shipping the same dependency
• PHPCS (WordPress Coding Standards), PHPStan level 5, PHPUnit test suite
• Translation-ready (text domain happenboard)
• Accessibility-aware front-end components

From the team

HappenBoard is built by the same team behind SEOPress — trusted by 300,000+ WordPress sites. Same engineering bar, same support commitments, same long-term maintenance.

Source code and build

HappenBoard is fully GPL and ships its complete, human-readable source inside the plugin — nothing is obfuscated.

• PHP — uncompiled PSR-4 source in src/. Third-party libraries are prefixed with Strauss and ship readable in vendor-prefixed/ (notably sabre/vobject for RRULE parsing).
• JavaScript / CSS — the editor and admin code in build/ is compiled with @wordpress/scripts (webpack). The matching uncompiled source ships alongside it: block source in src/blocks/, the admin SPA in assets/js/admin/, and the post-editor scripts in assets/js/post-editor/. The build configuration (package.json and webpack.config.js) is included too.

To regenerate every compiled asset from source:

npm install
npm run build

Requires Node 20+. npm run start runs the same build in watch mode. PHP dependencies, if you rebuild the prefixed tree, are managed with composer install.

All declarations follow WordPress prefixing rules: PHP is namespaced under HappenBoard\, options/transients use the happenboard_ prefix, post meta uses _happenboard_, and taxonomies use happenboard_ (happenboard_category, happenboard_tag). Post types use the shorter hboard_ prefix (hboard_event, hboard_venue, hboard_organizer, hboard_booking_type) because WordPress caps post type names at 20 characters.

Privacy

HappenBoard stores attendee and booking data (name, email, RSVP or appointment status) in your own WordPress database. It collects no telemetry, requires no account, and sends nothing anywhere by default.

Four optional features do contact a third party, and only once you turn them on:

• Event weather — the event’s coordinates and date are sent to Open-Meteo to fetch a forecast. No visitor or attendee data is included.
• Venue maps — an embedded map loads from OpenStreetMap (default), Google Maps, or a custom tile provider you configure. Your visitor’s browser contacts that provider directly, as with any embedded map.
• Cloudflare Turnstile — when enabled for the RSVP or booking forms, the submitting visitor’s IP address and challenge token are sent to Cloudflare for verification.
• Akismet — when enabled, the submission’s name, email, IP address and user agent are sent to Akismet for spam scoring.

All four are off unless you enable them. HappenBoard also registers with WordPress’s own privacy tools, so a personal-data export or erasure request made through Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data covers the visitor’s RSVPs and tickets.