What's New — June 22 to July 31, 2026¶

The biggest month in Revel's history: reserved seating, membership subscriptions, and season passes all shipped, the interface learned Spanish and Portuguese, and you can now embed your events on your own website. Here's the tour.

🪑 Reserved Seating & Venues¶

Revel now does full reserved seating, end to end — from drawing your venue to seated checkout and the box office.

Venue designer for organizers: draw sector blocks, place and rotate the stage, lay out rows and seats, and paint seats with price categories. A coverage warning lists exactly which seats are still unpainted or unpriced, so you can't accidentally put an unpriced seat on sale.
Interactive seat picker for buyers: a positional venue map with pan and zoom, per-seat prices, a price-category legend, and a live total — fully keyboard-accessible, and available to guests buying without an account.
No double-booking, ever: selecting a seat places a short server-side hold, so two buyers can never claim the same seat. If someone grabs it first, you see the conflict immediately.
Best-available mode: buyers can also just pick a price category and quantity and let the venue assign the best remaining seats (row-first scoring under the hood).
Per-seat-category pricing: one ticket tier can carry different prices per seat category — tiers advertise their real min–max price range, and tickets record the actual price paid.
Box office: door sales, comps, reseating, and assigning or overriding seats at check-in, with attendee debt rolled up per order.
Demo seed data includes three showcase venues (a theatre, a comedy club, and a music hall) if you want to see it in action.

💳 Membership Subscriptions¶

Organizations can now sell recurring memberships — the whole pipeline, from tiers to Stripe to member self-service.

Tiers and plans: create membership tiers under org admin → Members, each with an optional gating questionnaire and an optional approval step, and attach plans — monthly, yearly, one-off lifetime, or free.
Subscribing: members pick a tier and plan and pay through Stripe's hosted checkout; free and lifetime plans activate without a payment step. The membership appears the moment payment confirms, no refresh needed.
My memberships (/account/memberships): every membership you hold, with plan, status, payment history, and change-plan / cancel / rejoin actions.
Applications & review: tiers can require approval — applicants answer the questionnaire, organizers review in a Requests tab and approve, reject, or force-approve. Approval and rejection notifications now reliably reach the applicant.
Organizer visibility: a subscription metrics strip, a Subscription-payments tab, membership revenue folded into org financials, staff-side revival of a lapsed membership, and migration of existing subscribers onto a tier. Sale caps and pausing are supported too.
Public membership page: tiers now live on their own /org/[slug]/membership page — and organizations can publish a refund policy and grace period (shown to prospective members before they pay). Membership tiers are also drag-to-reorder (display_order on the tier API).

🎫 Season Passes¶

Sell a single pass covering every event in a series — with fair pricing that adjusts as the season progresses.

Pro-rata pricing: the pass price automatically drops for each event that has already passed (price − passed_events × pro_rata_discount), shown to buyers as a struck-through full price with "N of M events remaining".
Buyers get a My passes page with a pass-level QR code, coverage progress, and PDF + Apple Wallet downloads; pass-derived tickets are badged "Season pass" in My tickets.
Passes support free claims, offline reservation (pay at the venue), and Stripe checkout — online purchases use a single payment split penny-exact across the covered events, honoring each tier's VAT rate.
Organizers manage passes from a new Passes tab on the series dashboard (pricing, sales window, quantity cap, per-event tier mapping, holders list, offline confirmation), and can extend a pass to later-added events — active holders get the new event's ticket free.
Cancelling one covered event refunds each holder's share of that event; the QR check-in scanner accepts season-pass codes directly.

🎟️ Events & Tickets¶

RSVP notes: opt in per event ("Accept a note with RSVPs", accept_rsvp_notes, off by default) to collect a short note with each RSVP — dietary info, "arriving late", anything up to 500 characters. Works for guest RSVPs too, and notes show up in your attendees list and staff notifications.
Attendance visibility controls: decide separately whether guests see the attendee count, the capacity, and the guest list — with one-click Open and Discreet presets in the event wizard and recurring templates. Anything withheld is genuinely absent from the API response, not just displayed as a zero.
RSVP on behalf of an attendee: org admins can create or edit an RSVP for someone directly from the attendees list — handy for phone or walk-up RSVPs.
Attendees can now change or withdraw an RSVP on a full event — capacity is only enforced when claiming a seat, so a "yes → no" frees the spot and triggers the waitlist for the next person in line.
Two-step online checkout: Stripe purchases now reserve your spot first, then start payment as a separate step — so an on-sale rush no longer queues buyers behind each other's ~2.5s Stripe calls. Interrupted checkouts resume cleanly via Resume Payment.
Duplicating an event now prefills the new start date (rolling past dates forward) and shifts the waitlist cutoff along with the other dates.
The attendees list gained a multi-select RSVP status filter, and search results no longer show duplicates when a term matches multiple tags.
Recurring events are now DST-correct: occurrences honor the recurrence rule's timezone, so a weekly 19:00 event stays at 19:00 across daylight-saving changes — existing non-UTC series were re-anchored automatically.
The dashboard Upcoming RSVPs count now includes Maybe responses (previously Going only, hiding exactly the tentative RSVPs you're most likely to forget), with a URL-driven multi-select filter (All / Going / Maybe / Not going).

Embed Revel on your own website: a filtered event list for your organization, a single event, or a series — via a one-line loader script or a plain iframe. Embeds honour ?theme=light|dark|auto, resize to their content, and ship no JavaScript to your page.
oEmbed support: pasting a Revel link into a supporting editor (many CMSs and forums) produces a live card automatically.
Richer link previews: a versioned Open Graph share image, a square og:logo for chat unfurls, and Markdown no longer leaks into search-result and social-share descriptions.
Invitation links got friendlier: the join pages now show which organization or event is inviting you (name, logo, tier), and an expired invitation is clearly distinguished from a used-up one (410 Gone with a machine-readable reason).

🗣️ Languages¶

Spanish and European Portuguese: the whole interface — all ~7,900 strings — is now available in es and pt, matching the languages Revel already emails in. The SEO landing pages have editions too.
Italian and German no longer fall back to English on ~480 strings each (account deletion, privacy settings, invitations, recurring events, waitlist messages…).
Counted phrases now use each language's real plural forms — "3 persone si sono già unite" instead of an English "s" tacked onto a noun.
German UI text is now gender-inclusive throughout (Teilnehmer*innen), and the profile language menu finally lists every available language (French had been missing).
Dates speak your language too: every human-facing date now follows your chosen UI language with textual months everywhere, instead of browser-locale numeric dates — and first-time visitors no longer see the landing page flip from their language to English.

🎨 The Rebrand, Everywhere¶

"Bubble" + Nata Sans shipped for everyone: lavender paper light mode, aubergine club dark mode, crimson heart accent, sticker-round corners, and the "let's revel." lockup — all color pairs pass WCAG AA contrast and color-blind separation checks.
Branded emails and PDFs: every outbound email and generated document — invoices, credit notes, payout statements, tickets, revenue/VAT reports — restyled to the new brand. Tickets keep your organizer colors, adding only a subtle "Powered by let's revel." footer.
Messages that were plain-text only (guest confirmations, invoice delivery, revenue reports) are now proper branded HTML.

🛠️ Under the Hood¶

Backend runtime upgraded to Python 3.14; Django, anyio, httplib2, click, pyasn1, and pymdown-extensions all patched against known CVEs, and the frontend cleared a batch of high-severity dependency vulnerabilities.
The staff admin panel got a major overhaul: ~30 list views optimized to stop per-row queries, richer filters and read-only audit fieldsets, and two admin-only security hardenings (escaped organizer-controlled names, superuser-only ownership transfer).
Error responses across the API now have honest, documented schemas — what the OpenAPI spec says is what you actually get.
GDPR data exports now use an explicit relation allowlist, so an export can never pick up third-party data.
Search-engine crawl policy fixed: private areas (/dashboard, /account, org admin) are disallowed for all crawlers again, and AI-training bots stay blocked.
Financial documents can no longer be silently lost: payout statements and attendee invoices record when their email was sent, surface delivery errors in the admin, and retry undelivered emails via a sweep; one failed payout email no longer aborts the rest of the batch.
Telegram: banned users are blocked from the bot, and /unsubscribe now actually stops notifications.
Self-hosting: a new interactive bootstrap_admin command (run by the setup wizard) creates the first superuser and organization on a fresh instance, and deploys now post a Discord notification when they go live.
Ops: production now pages on Stripe money-correctness counters, deploys only roll out (and announce) components whose image actually changed, vulnerability-scanner probes are dropped at the Caddy edge, and public brand assets allow cross-origin embedding.

📋 Full changelogs: Backend · Frontend