Keys Weekly Events

The Challenge

The Keys have never had an event calendar locals actually trust. Facebook events vanish into the void, Eventbrite reads like a productivity app, and the legacy regional-paper CMS treats the calendar as a sidebar afterthought. Keys Weekly Newspapers already has the editorial authority and the print readership to be the answer to “what’s on this weekend?” from Key Largo to Key West. What it didn’t have was a publication-grade calendar at its own subdomain, a way to turn the submission pile into reviewed listings without crushing the editors, and a clean inventory surface to sell ads against.

The Build

A standalone Astro 6 SSR site on Netlify, sharing the Keys Weekly Supabase backend with the main platform but living on its own subdomain so it can be embedded, syndicated, and ranked independently. Tailwind v4 carries the newspaper register: bold red masthead, headline-weight Inter, calm white space, zero tropical clip-art. The brand brief explicitly banned bento grids, glassmorphism, sunset gradients, and SaaS calendar chrome, so none of that is on the page.

Three connected surfaces, sharing one database.

The public calendar runs region filters for Upper, Islamorada, Middle, Lower, and Key West, plus category browsing, search, a Leaflet map, RSS, sitemap, and a JSON /api/events endpoint. Every listing is useful before the click, date, place, why, in that order, so it reads like an editorial guide rather than a directory dump.

The submitter portal lets anyone post a free event from the public form. Magic-link login then lets organizers come back and edit later. Drafts land in a pending queue and never go live by default.

The editorial admin scopes five regional editors to their own region’s pending submissions, plus two super-admins who manage the whole calendar and user invitations. MFA on admin login, row-level-security default-deny on every Supabase table, rate-limit logging on uploads, and an activity log on every change.

The money side runs on Stripe. Event boosts buy timed promotion slots on the calendar. Premium listing subscriptions support split-pay. A lead-gen ad surface captures into ad_leads and fires notifications to the sales team. An /embed widget lets partner sites drop the calendar into their own pages, which turns Keys Weekly Events into shared infrastructure across the local web instead of a single destination.

Built on Astro 6, React 19 for the interactive bits, Supabase (Postgres + auth + storage), Stripe one-time and subscription, Nodemailer for transactional mail, and Leaflet for the map. Deployed to Netlify, with the domain cut over to events.keysweekly.com at soft launch.

The Result

The Florida Keys finally have a calendar that looks like the paper instead of a productivity app, published by the only outlet that actually reads as the local authority. Locals can scan a single page for what’s on this weekend from Key Largo to Key West. Venues and organizers get a real submission surface with editorial review behind it. The Keys Weekly sales team gets monetizable inventory (boosts, premium listings, lead-gen) on top of an audience that’s already theirs. Soft-launched in 2026 and growing into the system of record for events in the Keys.