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Event portal development

For destination marketing teams, local media groups and what's-on operators who list events submitted by hundreds of organisers and need the portal to handle moderation, recurring dates, venue pages, paid promotion and feed imports without a person retyping every listing.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

A regional what's-on site lists around four hundred events a month.

  • Organisers send them by email, through a web form that drops into a shared inbox, and increasingly by messaging the editor directly.
  • Someone retypes each one into the content system, guesses the category, finds the venue in a list that already holds the same theatre under three spellings, and hopes the date is right.
  • A weekly comedy night is entered once and disappears after the first Thursday; the organiser complains and it is re-entered fifty-two times by hand.
  • A festival with twelve stages is entered as a single listing with a wall of text.

Where it gets harder

Visitors arrive from search looking for "things to do this weekend" and find a list sorted by date with no way to filter by town, by family-friendly or by free entry.

  • Ticket links point at whatever the organiser sent, including links that expired two weeks ago.
  • A venue asks to pay for a featured slot and the invoice, the dates and the placement are tracked in a spreadsheet, so a promoted listing stays on the homepage a fortnight after it was paid for.
  • A council feed with two hundred events a season is offered as a spreadsheet and never imported because nobody has the time.
  • The site is the best-known listing in the area and the editor spends her week as a typist.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom event portal build normally covers:

  • Organiser accounts where venues Promoters and community groups submit their own events
  • A moderation queue with approve Edit, reject and request-changes actions and a record of who decided what
  • Venue and organiser profiles that events attach to So a venue page lists everything coming up there
  • Recurring event rules such as every Thursday until a date First Sunday of the month or a festival with a date range and sessions, each producing occurrences the search can find
  • Category Date, location and tag search with list, map and calendar views
  • Ticket links outbound to the organiser's chosen platform Or on-platform ticketing where the portal sells its own tickets
  • Featured and promoted listings sold as slots With a start and end date and a position
  • Saved events with reminders for registered visitors
  • Feed imports from organisers and councils who publish structured data

How discovery works

Discovery follows a week of submissions with the editor and the commercial manager: who submits, how many listings need editing before they go live, how recurrence is handled today, which venues are the same venue under different names, how promotion is sold and invoiced, and which feeds are worth importing. Each becomes a named stage in the scope document: submit, moderate, list, discover, remind, promote.

Deliberately out of scope

  • The editorial articles and reviews around the listings, which stay in the content system the publisher already runs and are linked to events by reference
  • On-platform ticketing beyond a simple outbound link, which is its own build

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A destination marketing organisation covering a county wants six district councils to feed their own events, two hundred venues to manage their own pages, a moderation team of three working in shifts, promotion sold by a sales team against a rate card they set, and a public data feed for partner sites to consume. That is a different build from a single-town listing run by one editor, and the scope document says so plainly.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from a week of submissions, including the current venue list, recurrence cases and promotion bookings
  • A written scope document naming each stage from submission to reminder, with what is out of scope
  • Design of the organiser submission form, the moderation queue, the venue page and the visitor search on phone and desktop
  • The build, deployed to your hosting or ours
  • Migration of existing listings, venues, organiser contacts and live promotion bookings, where relevant
  • Training for editors, moderators and the sales team, with a short written guide
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your data

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access, contacts and a look at the current content system, the submission inbox, the venue list and the promotion spreadsheet.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Discovery with the editor and the commercial manager; categories, recurrence rules, moderation roles, promotion slots and feed sources are agreed in the scope document with a milestone plan.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Clickable designs of the submission form, the moderation queue, venue and event pages and the search with calendar and map views, checked on the phones visitors actually use.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in stages: venues, organisers and events with recurrence first, then submission and moderation, then search and saved events, then promotion slots and feed imports.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The team runs a test month on real submissions, including a weekly recurring event, a multi-stage festival, a rejected listing and a paid promotion, and tells us where it does not match the desk.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Categories, moderation actions, recurrence edge cases and promotion placement are adjusted from the review and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Listings and venues migrated, feeds connected, redirects from old listing URLs in place, reminders tested against addresses you control, checklist signed off.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The portal runs on the new system; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Ticketing platforms for outbound ticket links and, where offered, availability checks
  • Council and organiser event feeds in structured formats for scheduled import
  • Mapping services for venue locations and the map view
  • Email and push providers for saved-event reminders and weekly digests
  • Card payment providers and invoicing software for promoted listing sales
  • The publisher's existing content system for articles linked to events
  • Analytics tools for listing views and outbound ticket clicks reported to organisers

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A county destination portal fed by six councils and two hundred venues

The situation

A destination marketing organisation received events from six district councils as spreadsheets, from two hundred venues by email and from a web form, and retyped all of them.

Why it is a custom build

This needs a custom build because the feed de-duplication and the venue-managed pages sit on top of moderation and recurrence in a way generic directory software does not provide.

The scope we would propose

  • Scheduled imports from each council feed with a mapping of their categories to the portal's own and a de-duplication step that matches on venue, date and title
  • Venue accounts where each venue manages its own page and submits events that enter a moderation queue
  • Recurrence rules producing occurrences so a weekly market appears every week without re-entry
  • A moderation queue with shifts and a decision log
  • Promotion slots sold by the sales team with start and end dates that expire automatically
  • A public data feed so partner tourism sites can republish the listings with attribution

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Number of organisers and venues who will manage their own pages
  • Moderation workflow: single editor or a team with shifts and a decision log
  • Recurrence and festival structures the search must understand
  • Promotion slots, how they are sold and whether invoicing is automated
  • Feed imports: number of sources, their formats and de-duplication rules
  • On-platform ticketing or outbound links only
  • Volume of existing listings and venues to migrate and redirect
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Event listings package

Organiser submissions with moderation, venue pages, recurring events, calendar and map search, saved events with reminders and promoted slots for what's-on portals.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

When is the package enough and when do we need a custom build?

The event listings package covers organiser submissions, moderation, venue pages, recurring events, search with calendar views, saved events and promoted slots with configuration. A custom build is the honest answer for multiple feed sources with de-duplication, a public data feed for partners, on-platform ticketing or several portals run from one back office. Discovery tells you which before anything is quoted.

Can organisers submit events themselves without breaking the listing quality?

Yes. Each organiser has an account and submits against your categories, venues and date rules; nothing goes live until a moderator approves it, and the moderator can edit, request changes or reject with a reason that the organiser sees. Trusted organisers can be set to publish without review if you choose.

How do recurring events and festivals work?

An event carries a recurrence rule, such as every Thursday until a date or the first Sunday of the month, and the portal generates the occurrences the search shows. A festival is an event with a date range and child sessions, each with its own time, stage and ticket link, so the search finds the Saturday afternoon set rather than a wall of text.

Can we import events from councils and other feeds?

Feed imports are scoped per source once we have seen the format. Each import maps the source categories to yours, matches venues, flags likely duplicates against existing listings and places the result in the moderation queue or publishes it directly, as you decide per source.

Who owns the system afterwards?

You do. Source code and data are handed over at delivery; hosting and maintenance are optional and separately agreed, and the system can move to another provider.

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