October has been the busiest month since go-live, with a run of improvements between 16 and 22 October. Here is what changed, grouped by who it matters to. Every change is listed on the Releases page in the back office.

Venues: pages that get people to the door

  • Venue pages are arrival guides. They open with a photo of the entrance, whether something is on now or when the doors next open, and directions to the right door. Then parking, with any time limit made clear, how to get there, finding your way inside, facilities, accessibility, wifi and safety.
  • Every station, stop and car park. A venue can list each train station, bus stop, car park, bike rack and drop-off point nearby, shown on the map with walking times. Car parks can show spaces, cost, time limit, opening hours, electric car charging and a link to book a space.
  • Event pages carry the arrival guide too, and warn guests if an event runs longer than a car park's time limit.
  • Adding a venue is six short steps. Only the name and address are needed to start.
  • Help filling in the arrival details. The network team can look up a venue's surroundings and its own website for parking and access notes. Suggestions only fill empty fields, say where they came from, and stay marked as unconfirmed until someone checks them.
  • Safer claims and enquiries that reach the right people. Claiming a venue already on the network is now a request the network confirms. Room hire enquiries go to every owner and admin of the venue.

Organisers: repeating events and teams

  • Repeating events: weekly, fortnightly or monthly, up to 52 dates in one go. Any event can also be copied.
  • The whole team can run events: edit, unpublish, download the guest list and decide requests, not just the person who created them.
  • Changes reach everyone: moving a time or cancelling now emails and notifies everyone holding a place. An event that wasn't approved can be fixed and sent again.
  • Events booked elsewhere can say where their tickets are sold and link straight there.

Guests: booking that tells the truth

  • Finished events stop selling and no longer sit at the top of lists. Booking emails now show the right time; they had been an hour early all summer.
  • Signing in to book brings you back to the event you were looking at.
  • The Tickets page shows each booking as it is: going, on the waitlist, request sent, approved, not approved or not paid.
  • Map bubbles list their events when you hover, or tap on a phone.
  • Readable on every device: forms that were hard to read on phones set to dark mode are fixed.

Put it in Studio once, show it on any website

The biggest theme of the month: whatever you enter in Studio can now appear, looking right, on almost any website.

  • A map beside the list. Every event on a map, with the list showing only what the map shows. A Near me button finds what's close.
  • Make it match your site: colours, fonts, capitals or sentence case, date and time style, your own wording, and a warning when two colours are hard to read.
  • Pages that suit you: choose a Showcase, Standard or Compact page for events, venues and organisers, or send visitors to your own pages instead.
  • A search box for your website's header or homepage, with suggestions as people type.
  • Works with the site you have: WordPress (with a plugin), Squarespace, Wix, Webflow or any other website, and it sizes itself to fit the page.
  • Your own website, built from Studio. A region or organisation can build its whole site from what is in Studio, the way hampshire.events does.

See putting your events on your own website for how it works.

Regions: their own look, their own website

  • Region teams get the whole back office for their own region: overview, fonts, app icon, fees, memberships, website listings and the team.
  • Your own app icon for browser tabs, phone home screens and the installed app.
  • Your own sign-in screen: a picture on the left or right, or the form over a full-screen picture or film, with your own headline.
  • Send visitors to your own website: the app's public pages pass visitors to the matching page on the region's own site, and the logo can link there. Events booked in the app keep their page in the app. How hampshire.events uses it.
  • Regions shown in their own colours on businesseventstack.com, with their own icon and a link to their website.

Pictures for listings

Events, venues and organisers can now have pictures: the event's own image, the venue's own photo, the organiser's own logo. Where there is none, an event gets a photo of that kind of event and a venue a photo of its town. Those stand-in photos always carry the photographer's credit and are never presented as the event or venue itself.

Changes show everywhere within minutes

And the last change of the month: anything you update in Studio now reaches every website showing your listings within about five minutes, including listings written into WordPress pages.

The September summary covers the changes before these.