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Glossary

Words SocietyPress uses, defined in plain English. If a term in another guide isn't obvious, it's probably in here. Organized by topic rather than alphabetically — most webmasters look things up by what they're trying to do, not what something starts with.

People

Member — Someone on your roster (sp_members). Every member has a WordPress user account behind the scenes, even if they never sign in; the two are linked by the account's user_id.

Visitor — Someone reading your site without logging in. Visitors can see public pages (events, the directory if it's set to public, blog posts, the library catalog), but not member-only content.

Admin / Webmaster — The volunteer who manages the site. Usually a WordPress administrator with full SocietyPress access.

Society — Your organization. The entity that owns the website. SocietyPress doesn't model multiple societies per install; one install = one society.

Chair — A user who chairs at least one committee. Not a permission level — it's read live from the sp_committees.chair_user_id column. A chair sees My Committee under Meetings & Board in the sidebar.

Membership terms

Membership plan (tier) — A class of membership with its own dues and length. New sites start with Individual, Joint/Family, Student, Lifetime and Honorary. Change them under Members → Membership Plans.

Joint member — Two people in one household on one membership (typically a couple): two member records linked by the same household, paying once.

Household — A group of sp_members rows sharing a household_id. Used for billing (one renewal per household) and physical-mail addressing (one envelope per household).

Active / Expired / Inactive — The main member statuses. Active = paid up (or within the grace period). Expired = the membership ran out and wasn't renewed; SocietyPress sets this automatically each night. Inactive = set by hand for someone who has left. Expired members are treated as visitors for members-only content.

Grace period — For an annual membership year, the months after the year turns during which unpaid members stay Active. Set as Renewal Grace Period under Settings → Membership (2 months unless you change it). Rolling memberships have none.

Fiscal year / Membership year — The 12-month window your society renews on. Set as Period Starts under Settings → Membership; July unless you change it. Insights' "This fiscal year" uses the same setting.

Renewal reminder — Automatic email sent before a membership expires: 30, 15 and 7 days before, each of which can be turned off under Settings → Membership → Renewal Reminders. An optional "your membership has expired" notice can follow.

Events terms

Event — A scheduled activity (meeting, workshop, cemetery walk, conference). Stored in sp_events.

Registration / RSVP — A member or guest signing up to attend an event. Stored in sp_event_registrations. "Registration" and "RSVP" are interchangeable in SocietyPress; the admin column is labeled Registrations.

Slot — A specific time and capacity within an event. Used for events with multiple sessions (a tour with 9am, 11am, 1pm slots) or capacity limits. Most events have one implicit slot.

Speaker — A presenter associated with an event. Stored separately so a speaker who returns gets their bio carried over. Multiple speakers per event supported.

iCal feed — A standard .ics URL members add to their personal calendar app to subscribe to your events. SocietyPress generates one automatically. External Calendars also lets you subscribe to other societies' iCal feeds and pull their events into yours.

Library, records, and content

Catalog — Your library's book and media inventory, searchable on your site.

OPAC — Online Public Access Catalog. Library jargon for the public-facing search interface to a library catalog. SocietyPress's library frontend is OPAC-style.

Record collection — A purpose-built database of transcribed records — cemetery indexes, census transcripts, marriage registers, obituary indexes. Each collection has its own custom fields. Stored as one row per collection in sp_record_collections, with the actual records in sp_records and per-field values in sp_record_values (EAV pattern).

GENRECORD — An open exchange format for transcribed genealogical records, maintained alongside SocietyPress. Any record collection can be exported in it, so a collection can move to another platform that reads the format. See genrecord.org.

Surname research — A members-only inquiry index where each member registers the surnames they're researching, plus county/state/year range. Visitors search with Soundex + Metaphone phonetic matching and contact the researching member through an anti-spam form.

Page builder — SocietyPress's page composer. You stack widgets on a page and put them in order with arrow buttons. No code.

Widget — A ready-made block in the page builder. Examples: Member Directory, Upcoming Events, Donation Form, Contact Card. Each has its own settings.

Shortcode — A bracketed code ([sp_donate], [societypress_join], etc.) you can paste into any page or post, which SocietyPress replaces with the live feature. Many widgets have one, but not all, and some shortcodes have no widget.

Donations and money

Campaign — A fundraising drive with a goal amount, optional deadline, and a public progress bar. Donations can be tied to a campaign or "general fund."

Cover the fee — Optional checkbox on the donation form letting the donor pay the Stripe/PayPal processing fee (about 3%) so the society receives the full amount. SocietyPress calculates the bump and adds it to the charge.

Recurring donation — Monthly or yearly giving through Stripe. Each later payment is recorded when Stripe tells your site about it, which needs the webhook set up under Settings → Events → Online Payments.

Pseudonymization — On a GDPR erasure request, donations don't get deleted (the IRS wants the dollar amount and date for nonprofit recordkeeping); the donor's name and contact info get wiped and replaced with placeholders. The amount and date stay on the books.

501(c)(3) — IRS designation for tax-exempt charitable nonprofits in the US. Donations to a 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible. Receipts for deductible gifts need specific language. SocietyPress can print it with your EIN, but there's no screen to enter the EIN yet — see the roadmap.

Communications

Blast email — An email sent to all members or a chosen group, from Newsletters & Email → Send Email. Not the same as transactional email.

Transactional email — System-generated email triggered by a single event: a renewal reminder, an event confirmation, a password reset. Always one-to-one. Goes through wp_mail().

SMTP — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The plumbing email travels over. WordPress sends through PHP's mail() by default; for reliable delivery you point WordPress at a real SMTP service via a plugin like WP Mail SMTP. See the Email Setup guide.

SPF / DKIM / DMARC — DNS records that tell receiving mail servers your email is legitimate. SPF says "these IPs are allowed to send for my domain"; DKIM signs each message; DMARC tells the world what to do if SPF or DKIM fail. All three together is what gets you out of spam folders.

Permissions

Access area — A permission scope. SocietyPress has 10: Members, Events, Library, Finances, Communications, Genealogical Records, Leadership & Volunteers, Content & Pages, Settings & Design, and Reports. A volunteer with only Library sees only the Library screens.

Role template — A pre-built bundle of access areas. Pick "Treasurer" and the Finances + Reports areas auto-check. SocietyPress ships 8: Webmaster, Membership Manager, Treasurer, Event Coordinator, Librarian, Communications Director, Records Manager, Content Editor.

WordPress administrator — A WP-level role (manage_options capability) that bypasses SocietyPress's access-area system entirely. Always has full access. To restrict an account, change its WP role to Subscriber first, then assign SP access areas.

Insights

Insight panel — One card on Reports → How We're Doing, showing a number, a label and a sparkline for one feature. Developers can add their own through the sp_insights_panels filter.

Sparkline — A tiny inline chart showing the trend of a number across the chosen time window. SocietyPress draws them as inline SVG (no chart library, no JavaScript). Up-and-to-the-right is good; flat is "no activity"; a recent dip means whatever you tried last quarter slowed down.

Time window — The period a stat is calculated over. Insights supports rolling 30 / 90 / 365 days, this fiscal year, and last fiscal year. Switching the window updates every card.

Other terms you'll see

ENS / EasyNetSites — Easynet Solutions, the platform many genealogical societies came from before SocietyPress. SocietyPress reads the standard ENS member export directly. ENS-Classic's announced end date is May 31, 2027; ENS-R is its successor.

Picture Wall — A gallery of member-submitted photos (typically ancestor portraits). Submissions wait for staff approval before they appear. Albums can't yet be marked to accept submissions from the admin — see the roadmap.

Society Sidebar — An auto-assembled member-portal nav widget that lists the enabled modules a logged-in member has access to. Drop the widget on any page (or use the [sp_society_sidebar] shortcode) for an ENS-style left rail without configuring a menu.

Lineage program — A membership-recognition program for descendants of a specific ancestor group (First Families of [your county], Pioneer Settlers, Civil War Veterans Descendants, Mayflower Descendants). Members apply, staff reviews proofs, approved applicants appear on a public roster with a printable certificate.

Help request — A research question anyone can post, answered by members in a public archive. The time each answer took is added to the volunteer's hours.

Research case — A paid escalation of a help request that genuinely needs many hours of focused work. Stripe-billed up front; additional hours invoiced as needed.

Encrypted at rest — Members' cell and other phone numbers and street addresses are stored encrypted (libsodium). The key is worked out from the secret keys in wp-config.php, not kept in the database. See Privacy & GDPR.

Cron / wp-cron — WordPress's scheduled-task system. Runs jobs like renewal reminders, blast email queues, and access-log pruning. Replacing wp-cron with a real OS-level cron job is recommended for low-traffic society sites; see the Email Setup guide.

Transient — A short-lived cached value WordPress stores in the database with an expiry. SocietyPress uses them for things that are slow to work out and don't change often, such as the active-members count on Insights (kept for five minutes).

Harold — The non-technical webmaster SocietyPress is designed for: a volunteer who's served on a society board, isn't a developer, has limited time, and wants the site to stop fighting them. You'll see the name in the code's comments.