Project: Convenely — config-driven WordPress platform for event and festival organisations
Status: In active development (beta)
Stack: WordPress, PHP, React, REST APIs, Stripe, Interac e-Transfer, PUC plugin distribution
The Problem with Event Software
Event and festival organisations have a specific operational profile that general-purpose tools handle badly. They run annual or recurring events that generate bursts of ticket sales, attendee communication, and volunteer coordination — then go quiet for months. They have donors, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees all interacting with the same database of people, with different relationships and different communication needs. They often have limited technical staff and tight budgets.
Off-the-shelf event platforms solve the ticketing problem and leave everything else unaddressed. CRM tools solve the contact management problem and have no concept of a ticket or a payment plan. WooCommerce solves the commerce problem and generates a support burden that festival volunteers cannot sustain.
What these organisations need is a platform designed for them from the ground up: one that treats a person as a person across every interaction — attendee, donor, subscriber, volunteer — and that a small team can actually operate.
That platform is Convenely.
What I Built
Convenely is a config-driven WordPress platform that scaffolds complete, production-ready sites for event and festival organisations from a single YAML configuration file. One command provisions a local development environment, installs and activates the right plugins, configures WordPress options, and deploys the result. There are no manual post-setup steps.
Under the hood, Convenely is a suite of purpose-built WordPress plugins managed as a private monorepo, distributed to client sites via a PUC (Plugin Update Checker) update server without the complexity of a public plugin directory or a CI/CD pipeline that non-technical staff have to understand.
Here is what the platform does.
CRM with Profile and Journey Tracking
Every person in the system — ticket buyer, subscriber, volunteer, donor — is a profile. Profiles carry a full contact history: every ticket purchase, every email sent, every payment, every flag or status change. The CRM includes a kanban-style journey board where staff can track where attendees are in a workflow — registered, paid, checked in, post-event follow-up — and apply bulk actions across segments.
A festival organisation with hundreds of active profiles in a single event cycle can segment, message, and track those contacts through the full lifecycle without exporting to a spreadsheet.
Flexible Payment Plans with Stripe and Interac e-Transfer
Ticket buyers should not have to pay the full price upfront if that creates a barrier to attendance. Convenely’s Flex-Pay system lets organisations offer multi-installment payment plans for any ticket type: a configurable schedule, automatic Stripe charge attempts for each installment, and Interac e-Transfer as a Canadian payment option alongside card payments.
A festival organisation using Convenely processes hundreds of flexible-payment ticket orders per event cycle. Attendees pay in two or three installments. Stripe handles the automated charge schedule. Staff see the payment status of every order without leaving the WordPress admin.
Ticketing with QR Check-In
Tickets are first-class objects in the data model — not a post-meta afterthought. Each ticket is tied to an event, a purchase record, and an attendee profile. QR codes are generated per ticket and scanned at the door with a mobile check-in flow that updates attendance status in real time.
Ticket add-ons (merchandise, meal plans, workshop registrations) attach to the same purchase flow. Staff can issue complimentary tickets, process cancellations, and handle ticket transfers — all from the admin interface.
Mailing Lists and Workflow Automations
Mailing lists in Convenely are condition-driven: a list can be defined as “everyone who bought a ticket to Event X and has not yet received the post-event survey,” and it stays current as that condition changes. The mailing list system integrates with Mailgun for reliable delivery.
The automations engine handles the sequences that would otherwise require manual intervention: send a reminder three days before an event, trigger a check-in email when someone is marked as attending, enrol a ticket buyer in a post-event nurture sequence. Automations are configured by staff, not developers.
Multi-Site Fleet Management
Convenely manages multiple client sites from a single control panel. A new site is provisioned with one command — no manual steps. Plugin updates propagate to all fleet sites via the PUC update server. A fleet dashboard gives an at-a-glance view of update status, uptime, and configuration drift across all managed sites.
This model means a small development team can manage a growing client base without a linear increase in operational overhead.
React Admin App and Public PWA
Staff access a React-based admin application that provides CRM, event management, and reporting features in a modern interface built for the workflows they actually run — not a general-purpose WordPress admin screen retrofitted to event management.
Attendees access a public-facing React PWA for account management: viewing tickets, managing payment plans, updating contact information.
In-Site AI Editor Agent
Site administrators can use an AI-powered editing assistant within the WordPress admin to make content changes in natural language. The agent operates within strict guardrails: it can only modify content, it logs every change, and it presents a diff for review before anything is committed. It is a productivity tool for non-technical content managers, not an autonomous system.
Outcomes
Convenely is in active development and beta deployment. Early results from the first production deployments:
- A festival organisation processes hundreds of flexible-payment ticket orders per event cycle, with automated Stripe installment charges replacing manual invoicing
- Mailing list management that previously required exporting CSVs and importing into a separate tool is now handled entirely within the platform, saving hours of staff time per campaign
- Multi-site fleet management with one-command provisioning has reduced the time to spin up a new client site from a day of manual work to under an hour
- Plugin updates deploy to all managed sites in a single operation, with rollback available per-site
The Philosophy
Convenely is built on one principle: the platform should do the work, not the staff. Every feature that exists in Convenely exists because a real organisation was doing it manually and should not have had to.
The config-driven architecture means that a site’s behaviour is defined in a version-controlled YAML file, not scattered across WordPress option tables. The plugin suite is built as a coherent system, not a collection of independent tools that happen to be installed together.
This is what 20 years of building WordPress sites teaches you: the problem is almost never WordPress. The problem is the architecture.
