It was a busy month, and cold

Alan Mathieson, CTO - 2 March 2026 Series: Building the Backbone

There's a moment in every platform's life where it stops being a tool and starts being infrastructure. I think February was that moment for Fesutibaru.

We shipped 171 commits across four releases. But the numbers aren't the story. The story is what changed underneath, and what it unlocks next.

Festivals Have Memory Now

Here's something most people don't think about: when a festival ends, its data dies. Not literally, it sits in spreadsheets somewhere, but practically, the next year starts from scratch. New programme, new logistics. Whatever you learned last time lives in someone's head, not in a system.

We fixed that.

Every festival on Fesutibaru now supports Editions distinct instances of your festival by year. Your 2025 programme, participants, travel arrangements, accommodation, and assets all live in their own edition. When 2026 starts, you create a new one. Your venues, roles, and settings carry forward. Your history stays accessible.

This sounds simple. It wasn't. We rewrote 15 database functions, updated 3 edge functions, and touched every operational table in the system to make editions work properly. It's the kind of deep infrastructure work that's invisible when it works, which is exactly the point.

Why it matters: Festivals aren't one-off events. They're institutions that run year after year. Their tools should reflect that. A festival in its 20th year should be able to look back at how they did things in year 15 and learn from it. Now they can.

Your Data, Your Way, The Public API

We've always believed that festival data shouldn't be trapped inside our platform. In February, we put that belief into code.

Fesutibaru now has a Public API secure REST and GraphQL endpoints that let festivals, their websites, and their partners pull live event, people, and venue data from Planner.

Every API call is authenticated with a festival-specific key. We enforce subdomain matching, the API key only works on one subdomain. Rate limiting, search (including by author and chair name), and automatic cache invalidation are all built in. When you update an event in Planner, any system using the API sees the change within minutes.

Why it matters: This is the foundation layer. The iOS app uses it. The WordPress plugin will use it. Any custom integration a festival wants to build, an event screen in a venue, a kiosk in the lobby, a partner's booking system, now has a clean, secure way to access the data.

We're not just building a tool. We're building a data layer for festivals. The API is where that becomes real.

Mobile Apps — Because Festival Season Doesn't Happen at a Desk

We've built a native iOS app. It's feature-complete and waiting on Apple's review.

This isn't a scaled-down version of the web app crammed into a phone. It's purpose-built for the things festival people actually need on the move.

For participants: events, accommodation, travel, documents, and social media images, all in your pocket. No logging into a laptop backstage to check which venue you're in next.

For publicists: your authors, their events, their logistics. One screen. No digging through email chains.

For administrators: full master sheet access on mobile, plus a "View As" feature that lets you see exactly what any team member sees. When a participant calls you confused about their schedule, you can see their view in seconds.

For operations, front-of-house, technicians, hospitality, drivers, marketing: dedicated screens showing only what each role needs. A driver sees pickups. A technician sees equipment and media specs. No noise, no clutter.

Ten distinct role screens, live data from Supabase, multi-festival switching, and Clerk authentication. Eighty-five Swift files of purpose-built festival infrastructure.

Why it matters: I've watched festival teams during season. They're not at desks. They're in tents, at airports, in green rooms, on the phone to a panicking author. The information they need has to be where they are. That's what this app does.

WordPress Plugin, One Schedule, Zero Duplication

Here's a pain point that came straight from our festivals: they manage their programme in Planner, then manually recreate it on their WordPress website. Two places. Two chances for things to be wrong. Multiply that by every schedule change in the final weeks before a festival, and you've got a recipe for errors.

We're building a WordPress plugin that eliminates this entirely.

Install the plugin, enter your API key, add a [fesutibaru_schedule] shortcode to any page, and your schedule renders live from Planner. Filter by venue, by date, by search term. List view or grid view. Your theme's styling, your data from Planner, zero manual updates.

The API key stays on the server, visitors never see it. Caching keeps things fast. Template overrides let themes customise the look. Standard WordPress patterns, no exotic dependencies.

Why it matters: A lot of festivals use WordPress. Meeting them where they are, with a plugin that works the way WordPress plugins work, means adoption is a settings page, not a project.

The spec is complete. The build comes next.

The Quiet Work

Big features get the headlines, but a platform lives or dies on the details. Here's some of what else shipped:

Multiple authors and publicists per asset. A book can have co-authors now. Multiple publicists can handle the same title. This sounds obvious, but getting the data model right, junction tables, UI for linking and unlinking, cascading correctly on delete, is the kind of work that makes the system trustworthy.

Accommodation rewrite. We separated the accommodation (the hotel, the flat) from the assignment (who's staying there, when, for which edition). This means accommodation venues are reusable across editions, assignments carry status, and the data model actually matches how festivals think about accommodation.

Upload consent. Legal consent and indemnification for participant photos and social media images. Not glamorous. Absolutely necessary.

56 help docs updated, synced to the database, and embedded for AI-powered search. Every view in Planner now has accurate, searchable documentation.

Schedule improvements. Column resizing, reordering, colour-coded events by type. The schedule is where programme directors live — every small improvement compounds.

Timezone fixes. BST handling corrected everywhere. The kind of bug that makes you question your life choices, now properly resolved.

What's Next

The iOS app launches as soon as Apple approves it. The WordPress plugin moves from spec to code. API key management gets a proper UI in Planner. And we continue the work of making every view in the system fully edition-aware.

February was the month Fesutibaru became infrastructure. March is when people start to feel it.

Fesutibaru is building the digital backbone of live culture, starting with book festivals. If you're interested in what we're doing, get in touch at info@fesutibaru.com.