Dancitive – for the joy of dancing

Dancitive contains a large number of interconnected social features, which created another important UX challenge: how do you teach a new user what the platform can actually do?

Rather than relying on a series of static tooltips, we built a guided onboarding system that creates a genuine demo experience for the new dancer.

During onboarding, the system creates a demo event and a seeded demo dancer, then uses the platform’s own functionality to generate actions such as friend requests, event invitations, likes, favourites and reviews. The user can experience the platform through actual interactions instead of being shown screenshots or simulated interface elements.

A dedicated onboarding service and middleware control the journey, ensuring the user is taken through the relevant steps in the correct order. This required the onboarding experience to work with the same underlying models and workflows as the live platform.

Dancitive has separate workflows for dancers, organisers and administrators.

Dancers have their own event discovery, attendance, social connections, notifications, reviews and personal journal. Organisers manage events, recurring schedules, galleries and venue information, while also accessing reporting and monetisation features.

The platform includes a separate administrative environment built with Filament, allowing administrators to manage users, events, reviews, dance categories, FAQs, blog content, platform feedback and other areas of the system without requiring direct database access.

This separation extends through the application’s routing and permissions, with role-specific route structures and access controls keeping the different parts of the platform distinct.

The organiser side of Dancitive is more than an event management dashboard.

Organisers can create one-off and recurring events, manage venue information and access reporting based on feedback collected from dancers. The platform also provides two separate revenue channels.

Premium subscriptions allow organisers to access additional promotional functionality, while a separate advertising system allows them to purchase targeted banner placements. Advertising purchases are processed through Stripe, with approval and moderation handled through the admin platform.

The advertising system also records views and clicks, giving organisers visibility into how their purchased placements are performing.

Location data presented another practical problem. Dance venues do not always provide perfectly structured addresses, so a simple geocoding request was not enough.

We built a dedicated geocoding service using OpenStreetMap Nominatim, with multiple fallback strategies for incomplete UK venue addresses. Results are cached to reduce repeated requests, while the resulting coordinates are used to display events through an interactive Leaflet map with location clustering.

This allows dancers to browse events geographically while keeping venue management relatively simple for organisers.

Dancitive is built as a full-stack Laravel application using Laravel 12, PHP and MySQL, with React and Inertia powering the frontend experience.

Rather than separating the application into independent frontend and backend systems, Inertia allows the Laravel application to handle routing and server-side application logic while React provides the interactive interface.

The application also includes Filament for administration, Laravel Sanctum for selected API functionality and Spatie’s permission system for role-based access.

Third-party services are integrated directly into the application where required, including Stripe for subscriptions and payments, Brevo for transactional email, and OpenStreetMap Nominatim for geocoding.

The application is deployed through GitHub Actions to a self-managed VPS, with separate staging and production environments and automated dependency installation, frontend builds, and database migrations as part of deployment.

Some of the most important engineering work is hidden from the user interface.

Recurring events required attendance, reviews and other interactions to understand individual event occurrences rather than only the parent event. Date handling also required deliberate treatment to avoid timezone conversion problems when displaying event times.

The notification system uses scheduled background jobs for activities such as upcoming events, review deadlines and reminders. Frequently used user interaction data is also prepared centrally so the frontend does not need to repeatedly request attendance, favourites, likes and friend-request information.

Stripe billing required careful handling of subscription states and webhook events, including cancellations that take effect at the end of a billing period rather than immediately.

These are not features that necessarily appear in a screenshot, but they are what allow the different parts of the platform to operate as one system.

Dancitive demonstrates why some digital products need to be built around the business or community they serve rather than adapted from a generic platform.

The result is a single system combining event management, social interaction, dance-specific feedback, personal journaling, organiser reporting, subscriptions, advertising, mapping and administration.

The architecture gives the platform a foundation that can continue to evolve as the community, event model and business requirements develop.