EventPanel, a Jambour Digital product was a project that I had the joy of developing two and a half years ago. It was not an easy task but was incredibly rewarding to finish.
Its origins go back to one of Jambour's first clients who required an event management system within their website. As a result, the system was tailored to the client's requirements. It was tightly integrated into the Sahara ecosystem which all websites are. It's development focused on simplicity rather than flexibility and as a result, the finished product met the original requirements to a T. But it was very static. New features were added and they were easy to add, but they were often niche features that were specific to one client.
In 2020 we at Jambour launched a separate product designed to replace a considerable chunk of the original websites code base. The product was called EventPanel and whilst it appeared the same as the original website, the underlying implementation was somewhat different. The new implementation was designed to make modularity the key focus of the design so that new websites could be developed faster than ever. Version 1 definitely did this to the degree that it could be used across multiple websites. But it still had a solid static feel to it and not a dynamic feeling to it.
Version 2 aims to improve this by building upon the foundations that version 1 set out. Version 2 gets rid of any ties to specific designs and reduces any club membership event to one of four kinds:
- A free event in which users can sign up to
- A free event in which users can sign up to and a superuser can pick who attends the event
- A paid event in which users can add to their basket before paying
- A paid event in which users can select a partner and pay to sign up to, or leave the partner field blank and allow another user to add them as a partner
These were outlined as functional requirements of the original client's specification that have slowly made it into the new specification for EventPanel. As such, we've also modularised the databases so that they aren't tied to one club.
Jambour Digital plans to make a live testable version of EventPanel available soon too.
