[ COMMUNITY_&_EVENTS ]

City Events Platform with Feed Syndication

2026Marketplaces & Consumer AppsIn-depth

What it is

A city event calendar where community-posted and syndicated events live side by side.

Client work is shown without identifying imagery

[ THE_PROBLEM ]

Why this existed

An events aggregator has a chicken-and-egg problem: nobody posts until there is an audience, and nobody visits until there are events. Waiting for organic supply means never launching.

[ WHAT_WE_BUILT ]

What we built

Two listing types with different rules. Events posted directly get the full stack: registration with approval queues, capacity with automatic waitlist promotion, ticket types, custom sign-up questions, email blasts and door check-in with a dedicated check-in desk. Syndicated events pull from public feeds, filter to the city, deduplicate and attribute back — registration stays with the original site. Plus curated calendars, host invitations, guest tables with CSV export, per-event insights, ICS export, a public versioned REST API with API keys and docs, email-OTP auth and view tracking.

Two listing types — posted directly and syndicated from public feeds
Registration with approval queues and capacity-triggered automatic waitlist promotion
Ticket types and custom sign-up questions
Email blasts to registrants
Door check-in with a dedicated check-in desk
Feed syndication with city filtering, deduplication and attribution
Curated calendars and host invitations
Guest tables with CSV export and per-event insights
ICS export and email-OTP authentication
Public versioned REST API with API keys and documentation

[ HOW_IT_IS_USED ]

How a company uses it

A community, coworking brand or city media property becomes the default place people look — because it carries everything happening, not only what was posted to it. The syndication pattern applies to any aggregator that needs supply before it has network effects.

Built with

Next.js 16DrizzleNeon PostgresBetter AuthResend

[ COMMON_QUESTIONS ]

Questions clients ask

How does syndication solve the cold-start problem?

It gives the site complete coverage from day one. A visitor comes because everything happening in the city is listed, not because three people posted. Syndicated listings keep registration with the original site and are attributed back, so it is aggregation rather than appropriation — and organic posting grows once the audience exists.

How do you handle duplicate events across feeds?

Deduplication at ingest, since the same event routinely appears in several feeds with slightly different titles and times. Getting this wrong is immediately visible to users, so it is one of the parts worth over-engineering.

Why ship a public API?

Because aggregators become infrastructure if they let others build on them. A versioned API with keys turns the dataset into something a local newsletter or a community app integrates with, which drives usage back.

[ RELATED_WORK ]