💫 We're revamping CTW's event management system

One of our biggest priorities over the coming months is a complete overhaul of how events, DJs, venues and mixes are managed on ClubTheWorld.

If you've ever tried to add or update content over the years, you'll know it hasn't always been the easiest process. We've experimented with several third-party event management systems, but they've often been slow, overly complicated, or simply not designed around the needs of the clubbing community.

We're changing that.

Our vision

Our goal is to make updating content feel like a natural part of browsing the site, rather than having to navigate separate admin pages or complicated forms.

Instead of managing everything behind the scenes, we want content updates to happen much more inline with the pages you're viewing. Whether you're looking at an event, DJ, venue or promoter profile, making corrections or adding information should eventually be quick, intuitive and just a few clicks away.

A much better experience for promoters

One of the biggest pain points has always been allowing promoters to manage their own events.

Creating an event is only part of the challenge. Uploading event flyers, banners and images, linking them to the correct event, and displaying them consistently across the website has always been surprisingly difficult.

Over the past 25 years, ClubTheWorld has accumulated thousands of events with a mixture of image sizes, formats and layouts. Nothing is truly standardised.

• Calendar header images are manually cropped.

• Event flyers displayed within event pages and forum topics are all different shapes and sizes.

• Promoters often update artwork after an event has been published, requiring flyers to be replaced. (e.g. adding or updating a playlist)

• Keeping everything looking consistent has largely been a manual process carried out on a best-efforts basis by the ClubTheWorld team.

We want to change that completely.

Our aim is to give promoters the tools to upload, manage and replace their own artwork, with the website automatically handling resizing, cropping and displaying images correctly throughout the site.

For promoters & DJs

We're designing a much simpler way for promoters and DJs to:

• Create and manage their own events.

• Update event details whenever they need to.

• Upload and manage event artwork.

• Add DJ mixes, recordings and media.

• Keep their profiles up to date without relying on ClubTheWorld staff.

The aim is to remove as much friction as possible so information stays accurate and up to date.

Community contributions

We'd also love to make it easier for members to suggest edits to event and DJ information. This could include correcting line-ups, adding missing DJs, fixing venues, updating times and much more.

This is a much bigger challenge because every change needs appropriate moderation to maintain the quality and accuracy of the database, so this will probably come later in the roadmap.

For now, we're still relying on members and guests posting corrections, additions and new event information in the forums, where we can review everything before updating the database.

We'd love your ideas

This is a major project and we're starting with a blank sheet of paper.

We want to build an event management system that finally works for promoters, DJs and the community - one that's fast, intuitive and removes as much manual effort as possible.

If you're a promoter, DJ, photographer or regular clubber, we'd love to hear your ideas.

• What features would save you time?

• What frustrations have you had with other event platforms?

• What would your ideal event management system look like?

We're especially interested in ideas around managing event artwork, updating line-ups, editing event information, uploading mixes and making it easier to keep everything accurate and up to date.

Every idea is welcome. Together, we can build something that genuinely makes life easier for promoters while preserving and growing ClubTheWorld's event archive for years to come.

If you're interested, we could also make this a little more "behind the scenes" by explaining that the long-term goal is for almost every piece of event information to become editable directly from the page it's displayed on, rather than through a separate admin area.

Thansk! 💙