Given that I’ve been steeped, as it were, in the world of independent music for most of my life — both in playing in bands and being part of an independent record label — much of my design work has traditionally been centred in this world. Over the past five years I’ve probably designed and built a dozen or so web sites for touring bands, and the one knife in my brain every time is finding an easy-to-implement, easy-to-use system for managing shows and tours on these sites.

Since WordPress runs most of these sites, I’d always hoped that some kind, dorky programmer would come along and release a plugin that would address this exact need, in much the same way that other kind, dorky programmers have released hundreds of plugins addressing hundreds of other needs. There are a lot of small, no-budget touring bands out there. “Surely someone will heed this silent cry,” I thought. But the silent cry continued, with no solution to cork the collective cry-hole.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I would fill it (the need that is) myself, and set out to create the exact plugin that I always wanted to use. Being my first WordPress plugin — and being that I’m not really a PHP programmer — it wasn’t without its challenges, but yesterday, I officially released GigPress 1.0 to the world. It’s a free download, released under the GPL, in the spirit of WordPress and its excellent developer community. May many mediocre bands use it to post their tour dates! (And perhaps some really good ones will use it as well.)