Overview

The Event Essentials SaaS offers online ticket sales, donations, vendor/sponsor/volunteer registrations for festivals and event organizers. In its current state, each festival/event organization (will be referred to as client) that uses our system runs their own self-contained, highly customized web app that is driven by a shared database. Each new client generally uses a common codebase as its starting point, but the copy of that codebase often changes drastically, with little standardization, to be tailored to that client’s specific needs.

Goals

We have begun development on a new system that will offer more customization and automation, as well as better deployment. Multi-tenancy will still be used on the database level, with one central, shared database being used. But the significant change will be introducing multi-tenancy to the web app. One codebase will run with each client sitting on its own subdomain.

Develop a new system

Different areas of the system offered to the client can be thought of as “modules.” Some of those modules include ticketing, donations, vendor management, sponsor management, volunteer management. They will be toggled on and off for each client from a global admin controlled only by EE.

Ticketing will be the first module to be developed, as it is the one that is currently the most standardized and primed for client customizability. Our goal is to have the entire ticket sale process be managed by the client from start to finish. Some of that process includes:

· Creating their event(s). Event information, branding, site content.

· Creating the tickets for each event and customizing what gets displayed on the ticket PDF, including product details, colors, rotating sponsor logos.

· Configuring and filtering reporting and exporting. Sales data by time period/product/geographic location. Revenue collected, fees, as well as redemption data. Ability to compare data between different years and discount time periods.

Standardization and versioning

All system features will inherently be available to all clients. This includes new features as well as bug fixes or changes to old features.

Improve and automate the onboarding process

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Tech stack

· JS (Vue)

· PHP (Laravel 7 framework)

· MySQL

· Apache/Nginx

The front-end JS framework/library is not set in stone. React, for example, could be used instead if it aligns more with developer experience.

Multi-tenancy

There will be two different types of tenants; clients and events. A client can have one or more events. An event will always belong to a client. Tenant-owned entities will have both client_id and event_id foreign keys in the database, with some exceptions.

Tenant routing exists on the subdomain level for the client and on the path level for the event. If the event slug is omitted, the next upcoming event will automatically be selected.

Client: https://{client_slug}.appdomain.com/

Event: https://{client_slug}.appdomain.com/{event_slug}

The client slug will be a unique alphanumeric with hyphens string chosen by the client. The event slug will be comprised of two parts; a client-chosen event slug, followed by the unique event id.

Take Coachella as a fictious client, for example. Their data and routing information could be as follows:

Entry in the `clients` table:

id: 2938

name: AEG Presents

slug: coachella

Entries in the `events` table:

id: 10293

name: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2020

slug: 21st-annual-coachella-festival

start_date: 2020-10-09

end_date: 2020-10-18

id: 10237

name: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2021

slug: 22nd-annual-coachella-festival

start_date: 2021-04-09

end_date: 2021-04-18

Root URL: https://coachella.appdomain.com/

Tickets (2020): https://coachella.appdomain.com/tickets

Tickets (2021): https://coachella.appdomain.com/21st-annual-coachella-festival-10237/tickets