Announcing Laravel Events

Laravel Events is a brand new community site that I created with the goal of helping keep the community informed of conferences, meetups, and other events. My goal is to pull over the events for the Laravel News homepage and also integrate with the weekly newsletter. If you run a meetup or local event go add your future meetings.

I want the site to look good and one way of doing this is to have images for each of the events. So, if you don’t have a suitable image then I’ll create one for you. Just leave that field blank and I’ll come up something before I approve it.

#Backstory

About two weeks ago I tweeted that, “It’s a rainy afternoon here so I’m going to try to create and launch a new Laravel community site” and my original goal was to go from idea to launch in one day, but that didn’t work. Life got in the way but I kept working on it at night and after a few days, I came to the conclusion that I was going in the wrong direction.

I had authentication, I had different categories of events, I had very specific time selection, and I realized all of those are overkill for this. Why can’t I strip everything down to a single list of upcoming events on the home page, then one form to submit your event. The only auth it needs is for the admin to approve and deny submissions and delete spam. Nothing more.

So I deleted everything I had and started fresh with the goal of making it as absolutely simple as I could. It’s more usable now, I’m not storing anything about the submitters, and it should be very easy to maintain.

Another thing I wanted with this is to open source the code behind it, and that is why it’s on the laravelevents.com domain. This way it’s separated from the main Laravel News code base and can be open sourced. The repo is live now and contributions are always welcome. Just keep in mind all PR’s will be extremely vetted.

I hope this community project works out and it gets more and more involved in the local meetups. If you have any feedback or ideas please feel free to share them in the Github Issue tracker.