Updates from March

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

February was the month Fesutibaru became infrastructure. March was the month we started living in it, smoothing the everyday jobs festival teams do dozens of times a day. Uploading images. Sending email. Working out what someone else can actually see.

None of these are glamorous. All of them are constant. Here's what shipped.

Images, at Festival Scale

A festival doesn't have one image. It has hundreds: author photos, book jackets, venue shots, social media artwork, and they arrive in bursts, usually the week everything else is on fire.

So the Image Gallery grew up. You can now upload multiple files at once with a step-through wizard that lets you set the details on each as you go. There's a select mode with bulk actions: pick a batch of images and edit their visibility, correct their source labels, or delete them in one move rather than one at a time. And for anyone living in the gallery, keyboard shortcuts: S to toggle select mode, A to select all, E to edit, Delete to remove, Escape to back out.

Two quieter additions matter more than they look. Images now carry source labels automatically ("Person Photo", "Book Jacket", "Venue Image"), so you always know what you're looking at. And visibility filtering happens on the server, which means a restricted image can never accidentally leak to someone who shouldn't see it. We also added an upload consent step before a user's first upload, because participant photos come with real legal obligations.

Why it matters: image management is death by a thousand clicks. Doing it in bulk, with the safety rails built in, turns an afternoon into a few minutes.

Email You Can Actually Account For

Festivals send a lot of email: offers, confirmations, schedules, chasers. And until now, once a message left the building, it was gone. Did it arrive? Did it bounce? Nobody could say.

Every email sent from Planner is now logged: recipient, sender, subject, and delivery status. A daily automated check contacts our email provider and updates each message's status: delivered, bounced, or complained. Administrators get a new Email Log under Settings with search, status filtering, colour-coded badges, and click-to-view detail.

Why it matters: "I never got the email" is one of the most common, and most stressful, sentences in festival season. Now you can look, and know. If a confirmation bounced, you find out from the log, not from a confused author standing in the wrong venue.

The First Bit of AI

We've been deliberately slow with AI; the sector doesn't need another gimmick. But there's one job it's genuinely good at: reading a messy record and giving you the gist.

AI Event Summarise lets administrators generate a concise summary for any event, pulling the key information together into a short overview from a dialog on the event record. It's a small, contained first step. There will be more, and we'll always tell you exactly what it's doing.

The Quiet Work

View As becomes first-class. Seeing exactly what any team member sees, whether a driver, a publicist or a front-of-house lead, is no longer a diagnostic afterthought. It's a proper, always-available part of Planner. When someone calls confused about their view, you can be them in a click.

Engagement metrics and analytics. Behind the scenes, Planner now measures focused time on each page (only counting when the tab's actually in focus), logs field-level changes to events and assets, and produces a daily report on session duration, peak usage hours and what's being worked on. This isn't about surveillance; it's about understanding how the platform is really used so we build the right things next.

Group email and cheat sheets for publicists, and the publicist data model tightened up underneath.

What's Next