The Event Planning System (EPS) is a multi-user cloud based Software As A Service (SaaS) web application specifically designed to assist in the planning of bird festivals. EPS is developed and maintained by Westlinks Online (www.westlinks.com), a technology company focused on infrastructure management and web application development. It was originally conceived and designed by Bob Revel from California. The platform is built on the Laravel PHP framework installed on a cloud based virtual host running Ubuntu Linux, with MariaDB and the Apache web server. It is usable on any modern web browser.

The primary components of EPS are Events, Leaders and Venues with several additional supporting components such as Tasks, Documents, Reporting and more. Add on modules are available such as the Communications Module, with more to follow. The Communications Module provides the ability to send outgoing messaging directly to leaders, vendors and attendees by email or SMS texts with integrated questionnaires to gather information useful in the planning process.

The primary objective of EPS, once your schedule is finalized, is to output your festival program to Signup Master, the provider which specializes in selling trips to attendees. EPS includes a Signup Master Extract utility which exports a file ready to be imported into Signup Master.

EPS is directly integrated with the Bobolink attendee portal, also developed by Westlinks Online, through shared databases resulting in a complete web solution for your festival. The Bobolink platform which in turn is integrated with the Signup Master API, provides attendees real time visibility into their purchased trips, giving them the ability add to to their itineraries with further trips and socialize with other attendees via the built-in blog. Two-way direct communication between attendees and Festival officials is also available from within Bobolink. Bobolink’s built-in content management system (CMS) allows you to design front-end web pages with multi-level menus, making it an end-to-end solution for your festival.