BACKGROUND

A sophisticated database and website system was originally developed for Wimborne Minster Folk Festival, using experence and knowledge from providing facilities for many events (Folk Festivals and Science Fiction Conventions) over many years. It is going to be of considerable use to other festivals and events in the future.

I have now parted company with Wimborne (No longer a) Folk Festival. I now work with Chippenham and any other genuine Folk Festival.

Rather than having lots of non-integrated spreadsheets and lists on many peoples computers to be lost when people leave and difficult to maintain, the idea is to keep everything in one place (heavily backed up). All records are central, with the philosophy that at the committee level, (almost) everything is readable by all (other than financial info), but only limited people can update each type of area.

FRONT END

Most pages are generated on the fly as needed, showing performers (music, dance, other), tickets and prices, events listed by venue, time, type.

Everything that can be a link is a link. An event links to venues and participants, venues have list of all events at venue, each participant has links to where and when they are on and who they are with. Each performer has their own page with details of their programme, who they are and about them.

This is not yet as sophisticated as the back end yet, but is getting there.

BACK END

This is where 90%+ of the system is. It has support for:

• Common document storage - across the festival committee and staff, with some access control based on function
• Timeline management - who is doing what and when, also recurring tasks from year to year
• Music management - records of artists, contracts and their programmes. (Not as full feature as dance at the moment, but will be expanded in the future)
• Dance management - many year records of dance sides, their wishes, requests, working out the dance scheduals, ensuring they have breaks, dance when they want and handle performer overlaps
• Other Performer management (eg Children's) - Similar to Music
• Trade Stand Management - booking, allocating, charging for
• Event management - details of venues, events, maps and posters for venues
• Finance - invoices, budgets
• User management - different users, with capabilities based on user roles and access level
• News and front page article management - a Content Management System to manage what appears and when
• Volunteers - Categories, questions, management and help
• Galleries - setup, import, crop, caption photos
• Multiyear working - Everything from previous years is stored, forward planning can be made as many years in advance as wanted
• Many other facilities

This sits on top of a database with everything stored in it.

This is potentially available as a number of separate packages, dance, music, documents, timeline, trade etc.

OTHER FESTIVALS

Realising that what was developed for Wimborne, could be of considerable use for other festivals, some work has been done to generalise it so others could use it.

This is an on going development and a few parts are still very Wimborne specific, the intention is that it is license-able in the future.

If you would like to use this for your festival. Contact Richard.

If you would like to help, (The software is mostly PHP, some Javascript and some CSS). Please contact Richard.

Note: The intention is to license the system, but (currently) none of the data about individual dance sides, performers etc.

The raw system is at Github.