Remembrance documentation

Remembrance puts obituaries, service details, a moderated guestbook, candles, photo galleries, printable programs and new-obituary email alerts on a funeral home’s own WordPress site. Remembrance Pro adds family access, livestreams, flower orders, memorial donations, encrypted pre-planning, tribute slideshows, reminders and multi-location support. This guide gets the first obituary published in an afternoon.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.6 or newer, PHP 8.1 or newer. Imagick on the server if you want iPhone HEIC photos converted automatically.
• For flowers and donations (Pro): WooCommerce with any gateway, or a Stripe account for the built-in Stripe Checkout.

Install

1. Download the free plugin from the Remembrance product page, or install it from the WordPress plugin directory once listed.
2. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip, install and activate. An Obituaries page holding the Obituary List block is created for you; the first activation opens the Remembrance dashboard.
3. Under Remembrance → Settings enter the funeral home’s name and address, choose a page style, and decide whether condolences are moderated (they are by default).
4. Under Settings → Email delivery connect an SMTP mailbox (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or any provider) and press Send test email, so alerts land in inboxes rather than spam.

Quick start

1. Remembrance → Obituaries → Add New: pick a template (traditional, celebration of life, brief notice), add the portrait, dates and text. Autosave and revisions are on.
2. Add services: visitation, service, burial, reception, each with time, venue and address. Map links and add-to-calendar files are generated for you. Fill the order of service if you want the printable program.
3. List family contacts so they are emailed when a message is approved or a candle is lit.
4. Publish when the family has approved the text. The page lives under your Obituaries page, for example /obituaries/margaret-whitfield-2026/; add /print/ or /program/ for the print views.
5. Approve condolences under Remembrance → Condolences and shared photos under Remembrance → Photos. Both queues show on the dashboard.
6. Add the Recent Obituaries and Obituary Notifications blocks to your home page. Visitors confirm by email and receive each new obituary or a daily digest.
7. Moving from a previous provider? Remembrance → Import takes their CSV export and matches the columns automatically.

Want to see it full first? wp remembrance seed loads a demo funeral home with obituaries, services, a guestbook and candles.

Remembrance Pro: activation and updates

1. Buy a plan on the Remembrance product page: Pro for one funeral home website, Agency for unlimited client sites. The Lemon Squeezy receipt has your key and remembrance-pro.zip.
2. Upload and activate the Pro plugin next to the free one.
3. Paste the key under Remembrance → License. Updates arrive through Dashboard → Updates from hexcorp.io. To move a license, deactivate it on the old site first.

If a license lapses, Pro keeps working. Updates and support stop until you renew, and a notice appears on the Remembrance dashboard and Plugins screen only.

Setting up the Pro features

1. Settings → Remembrance Pro: turn on the features you want. For flowers and donations without WooCommerce, paste your Stripe keys; the plugin registers its own webhook, nothing to do in the Stripe dashboard.
2. Flowers: add arrangements with photo, description and price, and set the florist email that receives each order.
3. Family access: on an obituary, invite relatives by email. They get a private page to edit the draft, share and approve photos and send it back for review, with no WordPress login.
4. Livestream: paste a YouTube, Vimeo or any https embed on the obituary; a countdown shows until the service starts and the recording stays afterwards.
5. Pre-planning: add the pre-planning form to a page. Records are encrypted with a key created on activation in wp-content/remembrance-keys/; keep that folder in your backups. Only users with the pre-planning capability can open records and every access is logged.
6. Locations for funeral home groups: add locations, assign obituaries and florists, and the listing gains a location filter.

WP-CLI

wp remembrance seed          # demo funeral home
wp remembrance notify        # send pending obituary alerts now

Privacy and accessibility

Obituaries, condolences, candles and subscribers live in your own database and are covered by the WordPress export and erasure tools. Every email has an unsubscribe link. Pre-planning records and their documents are encrypted at rest with an append-only access log, and nothing personal from a record is ever put in an email. Public pages target WCAG 2.1 AA: semantic landmarks, labelled forms that work without JavaScript, visible focus and large touch targets.

Getting help

Email hello@hexcorp.io with your site URL and what you expected to happen. Pro and Agency customers get priority replies.