Valley Women's Weekend

Overview

Valley Women's Weekend is a weekend of women-led events in Staunton, Virginia, presented by Valley Women Collab, a group formed in 2024. The 2026 weekend ran March 6 to 8: a kickoff with live music, a wellness morning, a content collab for local business owners, music bingo, Sunday brunch and a women-led vendor market to close it out.

What the weekend needed

This was new ground. The organizers had no booking process to replace. What they wanted was a streamlined booking flow for one-off events where each ticket needed its own time attached, on a site that could also sell a few kinds of tickets across several venues, handle the events that were a simple RSVP, and look like their event rather than a ticketing platform.

Off-the-shelf tools didn't fit the need or the budget. Building it locally also meant the money people paid stayed in the community.

What we built

A booking system, not a template

The part of this site you can't get from a theme is what happens after checkout. When an event needs appointments, every ticket in the order gets its own time slot. The ticket holder lands on a booking page straight from Stripe, enters a name, picks a time from a grid that shows how many spots are left, confirms it, and repeats for each ticket they bought. Full slots drop out of the grid, and the server checks capacity again before it saves a booking.

The slots were mainly for the content collab: a quick 15-minute session taking brand-friendly photos in a curated space, which the women could then use on and in their businesses.

Slots aren't typed in by hand. The organizers set a start time, an end time, a slot length (5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes) and how many people each slot holds, and the site builds the schedule from that. Each confirmed booking comes with an Add to Google Calendar link and an .ics file, plus a confirmation email.

Ticketing on the event card

Each ticketed event has a Get Tickets button that opens a dialog right on the card: ticket types, price, quantity, a running total, an opt-in for event updates, then Stripe Checkout. Ticket types can carry a capacity, and the dialog warns when tickets are running low. Paid orders are recorded by a Stripe webhook, and if the webhook is slow the confirmation page records the order itself, so nobody is left without a booking link.

An admin built for event day

Inside the CMS, a booking schedule view lists every slot for an event with its bookings and names, and prints as a clean run sheet for the door. Organizers can export orders to CSV, copy a ticket holder's booking link to resend it, and share a link that opens straight to an event's ticket dialog. The wording of the order and booking confirmation emails is editable in the CMS.

A site that knows when it's off-season

Between weekends, one switch in the CMS puts the site in off-season mode. The events list comes down, ticket sales close, and the hero changes to a thank-you and a note to stay tuned for next year. Booking pages stay live, so anyone holding a ticket can still pick or check their time.

Approach

The site is built on Payload CMS and Next.js with a MongoDB database, Stripe for payments and Amazon SES for email, hosted on Vercel. Events, ticket types, sponsors and email copy all live in the CMS, so the organizers update the weekend themselves.

Test mode is separate all the way through. With Stripe test keys in place, test orders are flagged, kept out of sold counts, slot capacity and the schedule, and their emails go to a test inbox. The organizers can rehearse the whole flow without touching real numbers.

The homepage is a single scroll: the weekend's dates, the events grouped by day, presenting and event sponsors with links to their businesses, and a way to get in touch.

Where it stands

The site has carried the 2026 weekend and is in off-season mode now, ready to switch back on for 2027.