The Story of GigPress

If you’ve been building with WordPress for a while, chances are you’ve heard of (or used) GigPress. For years it was the go-to plugin for bands and performers to publish tour dates—until development stopped and the plugin disappeared from the directory. Here’s the short story of how it started, why it was retired, and how GigPress Reborn brings it back on a modern WordPress foundation.

How GigPress Started (2007)

GigPress came to be because of a need. Derek was building websites for bands, and as Derek shared …

… they all had one need in common: they needed to list their live shows and tours. The plugin landscape for managing events was grim – my options were either plugins meant for generic event listings that offered almost none of the features a band would typically need (with obtuse management interfaces), or plugins which were poorly-supported and quickly-abandoned. So I read the first few chapters of PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites and wrote GigPress 1.0.

Derek kept improving GigPress for the next nine years. Along the way he added RSS feeds, a time field, post associations, tours, customizable templates and stylesheets, iCal export, and countless fixes. Eventually his focus shifted to other CMSs that fit his work better, and he started looking for a new long-term home for the plugin.

When GigPress Joined the Big League (2016)

In March 2016, GigPress joined a lineup of well-known event plugins like The Events Calendar and Event Tickets when Modern Tribe took it under its wing. At the time, GigPress had over 20,000 active installs, with users including The Cult, Blind Pilot, Merle Haggard, and Flight of the Conchords.

I joined Modern Tribe as a support technician a month later. It took about a year before I started working with GigPress regularly in the support forums, but once I did, I fell down the rabbit hole. The codebase was straightforward and easy to understand—which made it a great learning opportunity for me as a rookie developer.

It was a perfect playground. I loved the plugin so much that I became the primary support contact for GigPress, and eventually started contributing fixes and small improvements. I kept at it, even after moving into a support manager role—it remained my favorite plugin in the lineup.

Acquisition, Maintenance Mode, and Sunset (2021–2022)

GigPress was supported and lightly tweaked for the next few years. In 2021, Modern Tribe’s plugin business was acquired by Liquid Web. Inside a larger organization, priorities shifted toward paid products and revenue—and GigPress was moved into “maintenance only.”

That was hard for me to watch. Even small improvements became difficult: changes needed review cycles and attention that a low-priority, free plugin simply wasn’t getting.

The final blow landed at the end of 2022: a security issue was discovered, and the plugin was temporarily closed on WordPress.org. Soon after, the decision was made to retire GigPress, and the repository was closed for good. The plugin was sunset.

The support forum started filling with posts from disappointed users, who loved the plugin and other plugins didn’t fulfill their needs. It was sad and hard. I was toying with the idea of taking it on myself, but at the time I didn’t have the time and the knowledge. The plugin needed a full re-write.

Life went on without GigPress.

In late 2025, I was unexpectedly laid off during a company restructuring. It was a jolt—but it also gave me something I hadn’t had in a long time: space to think. In chats with former colleagues, someone floated the idea of bringing GigPress back, and that suggestion stuck with me.

Like a Phoenix from the Ashes

So I started rebuilding. I wanted to sharpen my development skills, and I finally had the time to do the work GigPress would need: a ground-up rewrite. I asked a friend to review my early changes and help me learn to write tests. Within a few weeks I had the core pieces working, then I took a short pause for the holidays.

Around the same time, developer tooling changed fast—especially with AI-assisted coding. After the initial overwhelm, I decided to treat it like anything else in WordPress: use the tools, keep good habits, and move forward one step at a time.

Lately my favorite mantra is “one step at a time”. It helps me calm down when I feel overwhelmed. So, I mapped out a plan to resurrect GigPress.

From there, it was steady progress.

I launched GigPress Reborn in April 2026. It’s a full rewrite of the original plugin, rebuilt to feel native in today’s WordPress admin. Instead of custom database tables, it uses custom post types for Shows, Artists, Venues, and Tours—so you get a familiar editing experience with revisions, trash, and bulk actions out of the box.

The Future

We’re at version 1.0.0, and there’s more in the pipeline. Some of the next improvements I’m considering are:

• RSS and iCal feeds
• structured data (schema) for shows
• more advanced filtering and display options
• better time and time zone handling

Is there a feature you’d like to see—or a workflow you need GigPress Reborn to support (venues, multi-artist bills, recurring shows, tours, festival schedules, etc.)? Please share it in the GigPress Reborn support forum.

1. I was born earlier than 2007, of course. 🙂 ↩︎