Federation

Overview

Federation is an optional network that shares your public events with the listings on eventschedule.com. Every listing links straight back to the event on your own site, so the discovery traffic comes to you rather than staying somewhere else.

It is available on any Event Schedule install other than eventschedule.com itself, whether you run a single schedule for yourself or a multi-tenant SaaS for customers. It is free, off by default, and can be switched off again at any time.

Turning it on

1. Sign in as an administrator and open Admin → Settings.
2. Switch on Share events with the network.
3. Add a contact email. It is used only to tell you when your install has been reviewed.
4. Save.

Before you save, the page lists exactly which events would be shared on the next run, so you can see what leaves your install rather than having to trust a description of it.

Saving registers your install with the network and puts it in a review queue. Nothing is published until an administrator at eventschedule.com approves it, which is a one-time step for the whole install. You will get an email either way, and the connection status on the settings page shows where you stand: Not connected, Pending review, Approved or Suspended.

Per-schedule control

Once the network is on for the install, each schedule gets its own toggle under Settings on the schedule edit page: List this schedule on the network.

A schedule created since federation was added to your install starts out unlisted, and its owner opts in with that toggle, so a new customer is never carried onto the network by your decision alone. Schedules that predate the feature keep the listing they already had and can be switched off individually. The settings page counts the schedules still waiting on that decision, which is the usual reason the preview is shorter than you expected.

The toggle only appears after you have enabled the network for the whole install, so on a multi-tenant deployment your customers never see an option you have not opted into.

On an event with more than one schedule attached, a talent and a venue for instance, any one of them opting out is enough to keep the event off the network: a listing carries every participant's name and the venue's address, so nobody is published on someone else's say-so.

What a listing looks like

Listings appear in their own section on the eventschedule.com browse page, badged with your site's address and filterable by country and language. Clicking one goes straight to the event on your site: there is no copy of the event page on eventschedule.com, and the link is a normal followable link rather than a tracking redirect.

An event needs a picture to be listed, matching the bar applied to eventschedule.com's own events. That can be the event flyer or the profile image of a talent or venue schedule attached to it.

Recurring events are listed with their next few dates, and times are shown in the event's own timezone rather than the visitor's.

Keeping it in sync

Sharing runs hourly on your existing scheduler, so it needs no extra setup beyond the cron entry Event Schedule already requires. Edits appear within the hour, and an event that stops qualifying, because it was unpublished, cancelled, made private, or its schedule opted out, is removed from the listings on the next run.

You can also run it by hand:

php artisan federation:push

The settings page records the last successful sync, and shows a warning if the most recent attempt did not complete. Failures retry automatically.

What is shared, and what is not

Only information that is already public on your event pages is sent: the event name, short description, dates, the venue's name, address and coordinates, the schedule's name, a picture, and the link back to your site. No attendee data, ticket data, contact details or private fields ever leave your install.

Pictures are copied and stored by eventschedule.com rather than loaded from your server, so visitors browsing the listings never make requests to your site until they click through.

Turning the setting off stops sharing immediately and takes your existing listings down with it: switching off tells the network to drop everything it holds from your install, there and then. If it cannot be reached at that moment, the request is retried on the next hourly run until it lands.