The Event Platform module - and how it can help you organise your next tech talk or event

The Event Platform module is a powerful solution that simplifies organising tech talks and events. In this article, we’ll look at how 1xINTERNET used it to create the DrupalCamp Berlin 2024 website. We’ll show you its key features, and explain how it made the process of building the website easier, and what improvements could make it even better.

Project background

When DrupalCamp Berlin 2024 was finally confirmed, 1xINTERNET agreed to provide the website for the whole event. This meant the design, development and hosting. A team was put together consisting of frontenders, backenders and project managers. We discussed what would be the best way to build this website: a standard Drupal installation or 1xINTERNET’s own installation? And how would we build the whole session management with session proposals, speaker profiles, session acceptance workflow and finally a full schedule to be shown on the website?

The Event Platform module: a hidden gem

We almost decided to start with a standard Drupal installation and build everything from scratch when we received an important tip from Nico Grienauer (grienauer) of Drupal Austria, who was involved building the website for the DrupalDevDays Vienna 2023 - using the Event Platform module. This hint turned out to be pure gold. For some reason the Event Platform module hadn’t been on our radars until then. Currently there are only about 30 installations, it’s too easy to miss.

After a first review of the module it was clear that we would use the Event Platform module to build the website and that we could also easily integrate it in 1xINTERNET’s own installation. Starting with this module instead of building from scratch gave us a huge head start. By looking at the Event Platform’s project page we could already see at the first glance that this module is serious, the list of maintainers includes Martin Anderson-Clutz (mandclu), a Solutions Engineer from Acquia and Mike Herchel (mherchel), a Drupal core maintainer and former Drupal Association Board member from Aguileana. Both are super-active and experienced senior developers.

Key features of the Event Platform module

You’ll get a really good overview of the Event Platform module by watching the 8 minute demo video above. Looking under the hood you get the whole content and data structure required to implement the business logic of any event based on sessions, speakers and a schedule:

• Content types - sessions, featured speaker, job listing, sponsor
• User roles - speaker, session moderator
• Session schedule admin UI - a drag and drop schedule builder with conflict highlighting
• Vocabularies - room, session audience, session category, sponsor level, time slot
• Workflow states - from session proposal to session acceptance
• Workbench emails - triggered upon session state changes
• …and more - different views and blocks for both admin and frontend

Benefits for DrupalCamp Berlin 2024

With all this it was possible to build the website with only a small team in a short period of time to deliver an exceptional event experience. What else do you want? Check it out! This year the DrupalCamp Berlin was special for everyone as it reunited the Drupal community in the heart of Berlin after a 10-year hiatus. It was a triumphant return, reaching the milestone of 150 attendees, and we are proud to have contributed to this success.

Reunited in Berlin - DrupalCamp Berlin 2024

Ideas for future improvements

There are a few features not yet included in the Event Platform module but would have helped us to make the process even more seamlessly integrated into a Drupal website. We have created feature request issues for these and hope they will be included in future releases of the module. We plan to support these developments, the issues are ready for 1xINTERNET’s contributors or any other contributor to help bring these enhancements to life:

• Differing time slot lengths - to accommodate varying session length, such as fitting two 15 minutes sessions into a single 30 minute time slot.
• Automated speaker confirmation -so that when a session is finally accepted, an email is sent with a confirmation link for the speaker.
• Internal session rating process for session moderators - anonymously have session moderators rate proposed sessions inside the website.
• Session language - make the session language a standard select field for session proposals.
• Ticketing - Process the commerce part of the ticket sales process from within Drupal including sending proper invoices.
• Attendee accounts - enable attendees to build their own personal event schedule from flagged sessions.
• Past session highlighting - if the current time is larger than session time, add a CSS class to the session.

The Event Platform module played a key role in building the DrupalCamp Berlin 2024 website quickly and effectively. Its features allowed the team to deliver an exceptional event experience in a very short period of time. Future improvements will further solidify its role as a cornerstone of event management in Drupal.