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SetTimes.ca Roadmap

Canonical active roadmap for SetTimes.ca. Use this file for handoffs between Claude, OpenCode, and humans.

Last updated: 2026-08-28

Mission

Build SetTimes.ca into the best multi-venue and multi-artist event platform for Waterloo Region. Next edition: Long Weekend Band Crawl Vol. 18 on October 11, 2026.

Fixed Context

  • Region: Waterloo Region, currently focused on Kitchener-Waterloo. This governs product language — marketing copy, meta descriptions, SEO targeting, statements about who the site is for. It does not override fact: the platform has hosted an event outside the region (Buddies Fest 2, Tillsonburg, 2026-08-07→09) and that record stays accurate wherever it appears.
  • Brand: SetTimes.ca. Do not rebrand.
  • Next event: Long Weekend Band Crawl Vol. 18, October 11, 2026 (event 37, lwbc18, single day). status = 'published' since 2026-08-28 with an empty lineup — the supported "Lineup TBA" state, live to the public. reveal_mode = 0, so a performance row is publicly visible the moment it is written and can fire follower email: adding the lineup is the announcement.
  • Shipped editions (both archived): Vol. 17 (event 21, 2026-08-02, 22 bands / 6 venues) and Buddies Fest 2 (event 36, 2026-08-07→09, Tillsonburg — the first multi-day production event). Lineups and venue rosters are live D1 data now, not spec.
  • Venues used by Vol. 17: Blue Room (inside Revive Karaoke), Princess Cafe, Prohibition Warehouse, Revive Karaoke, Room 47, Roost — all King St N, Waterloo.
  • Priority balance: fan-facing experience and admin tooling are both critical.
  • SEO: event pages, band pages, local discovery, and structured data matter.
  • Media model: one photo per band via existing photo_url and R2 upload flow. No video embeds.
  • Theme model: four user-selectable themes via Tailwind v4 CSS custom properties and data-theme on <html>, persisted in localStorage.

Operating Rules

  • Never merge with failed CI. CodeRabbit (make review) is the standing pre-PR review gate; the code-reviewer agent is trigger-only (documented invariants, migrations, architectural decisions). Reply to and resolve review threads — a reply alone does not clear the merge block.
  • Add or update tests for behavior changes where testable. Keep changes small and focused.
  • Track remaining/deferred work as GitHub issues (gh issue create); reference from PRs (Closes #N).
  • Avoid direct writes to localStorage schedule keys; use frontend/src/utils/scheduleStorage.js (YYYY-MM-DD lexicographic compare, never new Date('YYYY-MM-DD')).
  • Preserve after-midnight sorting from frontend/src/utils/bandUtils.js (AFTER_MIDNIGHT_THRESHOLD_HOUR = 6, never remove/lower).
  • Multi-day: single-day events stay byte-identical (NULL performance_date); never show a "Day 1" label on single-day events (gate on isMultiDay).

Status Summary (2026-08-28)

Two editions shipped in August 2026, and Vol. 18 is now published. Vol. 17 ran 2026-08-02 and Buddies Fest 2 ran 2026-08-07→09 — the latter proving the multi-day epic (#543) in production. Both are archived. Vol. 18 (event 37) went published on 2026-08-28 with zero performances.

The site left the between-seasons window on 2026-08-28, and the remaining zeros no longer all mean the same thing. Publishing re-populated the event-driven surfaces — /api/events/public (defaults upcoming=true) returns 1, /api/events/timeline returns now 0 / upcoming 1 / past 10 — while the performance-driven ones stayed empty: the iCal feed LEFT JOINs performances, so with no announced sets it emits no VEVENTs. That iCal zero reads exactly like the between-seasons zero and means something else entirely — published event, lineup not yet announced. Tell them apart by asking which layer a surface reads, not by the number. /api/stats/public and the sitemap remain populated from the archive throughout. EventTimeline keeps its dedicated between-seasons state and Past auto-expand; that path is dormant now and live again once Vol. 18 is archived. Before treating any such zero as a bug, check both halves: is an event actually published, and does it have performances?

Postmortem worth carrying forward (2026-08-10, #800): archiving BF2 took the public site dark. events.is_published was deprecated by migration 0005 but never dropped, and archive.js zeroed it alongside setting status='archived' — so when the last un-archived event was closed out, 13 public read paths gated on the dead column all returned zero rows at once. Every public event-visibility query now goes through functions/utils/eventVisibility.js. Two source-scanning guards enforce it: no is_published read or write anywhere outside __tests__/** and utils/eventVisibility.js itself (both sides of the build boundary — the admin exemptions came out with #799 part 1, and the shared-test-schema exemption came out with #799 part 2 once migration 0059 dropped the column, which is what proves the retirement complete), and no non-admin file querying events without importing the shared visibility helper (the scan matches the helper names — …EventStatusSql, concludedEventSql — so a hand-written inline status predicate does not satisfy it; one canonical home is the point). Two files are exempt by design and named in that guard — api/metrics.js (a write-path existence check projecting only id) and utils/timeConflicts.js (imported solely by admin, which must see drafts). The column and its two indexes are dropped as of migration 0059 (#799 part 2); both guards stay in the suite permanently as regression protection, not merely historical record.

The review of that work turned up one route the original sweep missed: functions/s/[slug].js, the OG card social crawlers fetch for a shared schedule link, joined events ungated while both of its siblings for the same slug gated correctly — so an event unpublished after a link was shared still produced a crawler-facing card naming it and its bands. Fixed, and the hand sweep that found it is now the second guard above.

The pre-event backlog is closed out; remaining work is correctness debt and Vol.-18 prep. See "Next Up".

Shipped since 2026-06-19 (highlights)

  • Public experience: event lifecycle states (Upcoming/Live/Recap via eventLifecycle.js + LiveContextBar); live companion (ComingUp, EventTimeline, "Next Move"); My Route with walk-time + buffer itinerary; ForkCard conflict chooser; genre-led discovery wall; full crawl history on landing; PWA network-first + offline schedule.
  • New pages: About, Contact, public Stats (privacy-safe aggregates), Event Recap, artist directory + search, venue directory + detail, Terms/Privacy (+ one-click PDF).
  • SEO: SSR meta + JSON-LD on band/event/venue pages, site-wide Organization/WebSite JSON-LD, sitemap content pages, per-page meta/titles, Waterloo-consistent language.
  • Multi-day epic (Phase 1, #543): per-set performance_date, day-aware grouping/conflicts, per-set-date APIs + COALESCE(end_date,date) windows, admin day selector, day-separated fan display. Invisible to single-day events.
  • Admin: bulk import/delete, reveal-mode embargo, per-follower announcement tracking + resend, batch follow / "Lock in your lineup", digest emails, venueless-performance edit fix.
  • Themes: light-theme WCAG-AA sweep across public surfaces; semantic tokens.
  • Perf/reliability/security: lazy-loaded admin + non-primary routes, batched D1 reads, service-worker cache, schema-drift guard (generated setup-complete.sql), CSP/Turnstile hardening, rate-limit + body-size + social-link/ticket-url validation, observability for silent metrics/email failures.
  • Infra/docs: MkDocs docs site at docs.settimes.ca; consolidated docs index; ICS feed correctness (America/Toronto).

Track A: Public Experience — delivered, proven in production

Done: lifecycle states, mobile live schedule (Now Playing / Coming Up / My Next), My Route rename + walk-time itinerary, save/remove + overlap warnings (ForkCard), offline/PWA, venue-lane view, King St venue strip, post-event recap page, day-of readiness pass (#554). All of it ran live through Vol. 17 and Buddies Fest 2.

Next: - Between-season surfaces: the homepage now has a dedicated between-seasons state and auto-expands Past (#800). Keep this working — it is the state the site sits in for most of the year. - Map-aware next-stop suggestions — deferred/optional: low ROI for a 6-venue single-street crawl already covered by VenueStrip + walk-times.

Track B: Visual Identity And Themes — delivered

Done: four-palette data-theme foundation, FOUC script, dynamic theme-color, header toggle, light-theme WCAG-AA sweep across public surfaces, semantic tokens (admin dark-pinned by design).

Next: opportunistic contrast tuning as new surfaces land; keep the semantic-token discipline on every new public component.

Track C: Band And Event SEO — P0 delivered

Done: SSR structured data + local signals on band/event/venue pages, site-wide Organization/WebSite JSON-LD, sitemap, per-page meta, Waterloo-consistent language.

Also delivered since the last revision: internal linking + recurring-edition archive (#555), SSR as the single owner of identity meta and JSON-LD on /band/* and /venue/* (#784, #790, #798), and the recap-gating fix (#787, via #802) that removed the indexable-soft-404 risk before Vol. 18 concludes.

Next: - Watch indexing. The sitemap gained ~268 URLs on 2026-08-11 when #800 restored archived editions to it (8 → 276, including 218 artist pages and 12 venue pages that had effectively never been submitted). Resubmitted to Search Console 2026-08-11 21:35 — 0 errors, 0 warnings. Google's last fetch before that was 2026-08-10 08:42, i.e. the pre-#800 sitemap: 45 URLs, 0 indexed. Re-check the indexed count once Google re-crawls; if it is still 0 against 276 submitted, that is a real signal rather than reporting lag.

Issue-tracked SEO work lives in the Next Up queue below, not here — one status per issue, in one place.

Track D: Admin Tooling — core delivered

Done: bulk import/delete, per-band verified follower counts, per-follower announcement tracking + resend, reveal-mode embargo, RBAC on every mutating endpoint, roster sorting.

Also delivered since the last revision: follower-engagement surfacing (#556), the reversible cancel toggle for pulling a set from a live lineup (#732 — never un-announce, never delete the row), and the bandFields.js link registry driving both the Links column and the gap filter (#712).

Next: - Roster mobile-view polish; reveal-mode lineup management refinements. - Vol.-18 lineup entry once acts are booked.

Track E: Performance And Reliability — delivered / continuous

Done: admin + route code-splitting, batched D1 reads, service-worker caching, schema-drift guard, observability for metrics/email failures, ZAP baseline documented.

Continuous: keep build warnings actionable and dependency alerts near zero (Dependabot); re-run ZAP after CSP/header changes.

Track F: Multi-day / Multi-event Platform (new)

Delivered and now proven in production: Phase 1 foundation (#543), Phase 2 polish (#542), day-scoped bulk conflict detection (#551), and the unified 6 AM festival-day boundary (#550). Buddies Fest 2 (2026-08-07→09) was the first multi-day event to run on it.

Also delivered since the last revision: retiring the two private re-encodings of the 6 AM threshold (#746) — api/events/timeline.js and event/[slug].js both now import from the canonical server-side home (functions/utils/eventDay.js, which exports both the numeric hour and a derived "HH:MM" string) instead of typing the literal locally. A source-scanning guard (functions/utils/__tests__/afterMidnightThreshold.test.js) backstops it within functions/. It is a backstop, not a proof: the numeric half matches only identifiers containing AFTER_MIDNIGHT, so a differently-named constant set to a bare 6 would slip past — see CLAUDE.md "Two homes, not more" for why widening it further would be noise.

Next: none currently open in this track. There remain deliberately two canonical homes, one per side of the build boundary (frontend/src/utils/festivalDays.js, functions/utils/eventDay.js); do not add a third.

Next Up (live backlog — see GitHub issues)

The tracker is the source of truth. Every item from the previous (2026-07-07) list has since closed — #554, #555, #556, #542, #551, #550, #466, #510. The current queue is correctness debt plus Vol.-18 prep:

  1. #766 — functions/api/test-utils.js hand-maintains a third, ungated copy of the schema.
  2. Vol. 18 prep — event 37 is published (2026-08-28); artist profiles are being staged now. Performances are held until the set times arrive from the promoter. On a reveal_mode = 0 event a performance row is public immediately and can fire follower email, so booking the lineup is the public announcement — not a preparatory step. Profiles are safe to stage meanwhile because /api/artists INNER JOINs performances, so a profile with no set is publicly invisible.

Closed since the last revision: #787 (recap gating, fixed by #802 — the sitemap, SSR and the JSON API now share one concludedEventSql() definition of "concluded", so a published-but-unarchived past event is no longer an indexable soft-404 when Vol. 18 ends); #799 (dead events.is_published column retired — part 1 stopped every read/write, part 2 dropped the column and its two indexes via migration 0059, replacing them with idx_events_status_date on (status, date)); #746 (the two private re-encodings of the 6 AM after-midnight threshold now import from the canonical server-side home instead); #797 (the ignored <meta name="keywords"> is gone from BandProfilePage, taking its now-empty <Helmet> and react-helmet-async import with it).

Parked (do not resurface unprompted): band photo drives (explicitly deprioritized).

Reference Docs

  • CLAUDE.md: assistant context, invariants, stack, and safety rules.
  • docs/INDEX.md: documentation index.
  • docs/DATABASE.md: schema and database implementation notes.
  • docs/TESTING.md: testing strategy and known test categories.