The brief

Ukrainian festivals outside Ukraine are usually run by small volunteer teams. The website is often a Facebook page, applications arrive in a mix of forms and private messages, and the knowledge of how to run the day stays in a few heads. For UAFest 2026, the Ukrainian festival near Ottawa, Marketing MIX built a festival site and a CRM where vendors, volunteers, artists and sponsors applied and the organizing team worked every application.

The brief for uafest.com was to open that system to other festivals. A new organizer should get a working public site and an application desk on the first evening, without commissioning a website or cloning code, and should be able to ask the people who already ran a season.

What we built

One codebase, a site for every festival

uafest.com is a multi-tenant Next.js application written in TypeScript. Every request is sorted by host name: uafest.com serves the network pages, and an address like your-festival.uafest.com is served by the festival renderer from the same code. Reserved and malformed subdomains answer 404. A certificate for a new festival address is issued on demand, and only for festivals that have been published. Each festival's records sit in a Postgres database, separated by festival, with row-level access rules.

Launch in one evening

The launch flow is short. The organizer signs in with a link sent to their e-mail, gives the festival a name, a date and a city, and chooses which calls to open: vendors, food, performers, volunteers, sponsors. The site goes live in English and Ukrainian with the dates, the place, the program and the forms. Every applicant gets a reference number. The team sees all applications in one inbox with statuses and notes, colleagues join by e-mail, and the organizer gets a letter for each new application.

A public demo, Sunflower Days at demo.uafest.com, shows a fictional festival with working forms that send to a demo inbox. The home page shows six screens of the Festival OS workspace (a workspace overview, applications, leads, participants, program and tasks), all filled with example records and labelled as such.

Playbooks and mentoring

Five starter playbooks come from the working notes of the Lanark County festival: a core team of two to four people and its weekly rhythm, volunteers and the festival day, a sponsor package, evidence for grant reports, and consent to publish. Each playbook is a list of dated steps. The organizer picks the festival date, and every step gets a due date and an owner role in Festival OS. A mentoring form sends a question, with the topic and the days left until the festival, to an organizer who has handled the same problem.

Search and preview safety

One switch decides whether a deployment can be indexed. Previews stay out of search, private paths such as the dashboard and sign-in are noindex everywhere, and the public sitemap lists each page with its Ukrainian twin under /ua.

Where it stands today

On 8 November 2026 uafest.com is live in English and Ukrainian, with For festivals, Launch, Mentoring, Playbooks and Network in the menu and 24 addresses in its sitemap. The site says plainly what works now: the website and the application desk, with passes and mailings listed as the next step. The repository history runs from 1 September to 7 November 2026.

Related

The sites behind it: corporate websites. Software products: B2B SaaS. The festival it grew from: UAFest 2026 and the earlier Ukrainian Fest Lanark mobile guide.

Project lead: Marketing MIX. Product: UAFest Network (uafest.com), platform for Ukrainian festivals. Year: 2026.