August | Updates, Bug Fixes, And New Features
Hello!
With August in full swing, a bunch of new events have been added to Plug.Events since last month! 
In this month’s newsletter, we want to give you a glimpse into what we’ve been working on and share how the platform is growing. We’re working hard to find ways to provide you all with the most optimal user experience. If you have any feedback, we will be engaging in a comprehensive user experience review, with open meetings every month focused on different aspects of the website. If you are interested in participating we’d love to hear from you!
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What We’ve Been Doing
The past couple of months have been broken up by holidays and trips, juggling final exams and concerts, starting new jobs and moving into new homes, harvest season, and many other priorities! No one on the team earns a living from this project right now. We have no revenue or investment capital.
Despite that fact, the team has been deep in planning and preparing for the second half of the year by improving our development pipeline, how we prioritise tasks, reviewing the platform’s usability, engaging in a branding exercise, and keeping communities and users informed about the features, updates, and bugs that we’re working on.
We’ve also become closer and tighter as a team. More people are starting to join as ambassadors and new contributors, and have been helping us to understand how to communicate more clearly about what we are creating as a company – PublicSpaces.io – and as our first product – Plug.Events.
The balfolk and forró communities are starting to get behind the project as well, with many new sign-ups and partnerships brewing! We’ve established a good workflow that makes curating all of the balfolk and forró events manageable, even the smaller ones in obscure locations.
Put simply, we have been cultivating clarity in our direction and mission. It might be high summer out there in the world, but in our little bubble, we are seeing the first signs of spring growth. 
Our Growth
1,600 Total Events Created; 976 Upcoming!
Total User Sign-ups: 72
Updates and Upcoming Improvements
Full-screen map
We realised that scrolling event pages was more difficult, especially on mobile, when the map was navigable within the page. The user’s finger or mouse would suddenly stop scrolling the page and move the map around. So we decided to allow the map to open in a full screen, which is much easier to use. Click on the Zoom button to open full screen.
Important Updates Across Other Areas of the Platform
- Add security standards to password setting
- On Create Event do not allow ‘as an Org’ if user has none
- Change the text for linking capital from “Link to another event” to “Link – Make this part of another event”
- Make the Universal Nav scroll independently from the Body + right column
What You Can Look Forward to From Plug.Events
Recurring Events
This would certainly be a game-changer for us.
We are adding festivals and parties from the forró and balfolk communities, but there are a lot of smaller regular events we also want to cover. Recurring events will allow us, and you, to add the classes and weekly parties that are such an important part of most dance organiser’s activities. When we release recurring events, later this year, we will publish a guide explaining everything you need to know about how to get the best out of them. If you are an organiser who has tried to post your regular events online this is going to make your life a whole lot easier.
More Coming on Next Month…
- User Support Channel. We want to make it easier for you to reach out to us, so in the near future, we will have a support feature.
- Social media previews on Plug links. When you post a link from Plug.Events you will see the images and text previews.
- Improved notifications and event suggestions. We want to give you a reliable and relevant event digest based upon your interests
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Are you a UX Expert?
Curious about who we are? Would you like to participate? We are currently searching for a UX lead to help us develop a process for improving the usability of the website. So feel free to reach out to us!
We have more exciting updates and features in the pipeline. So, be sure to keep an eye out for more news from us here at Plug.Events.
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@about.plug.events.
Cheers,
The Plug.Events Team
