Gather Grove Communities

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