Rebuilding an outdoor events platform with partner self-service on Kentico

About the client

TimeOutdoors is a UK online community for people who want to be more active outdoors.

Founded in 2000, the platform brings together running, cycling, swimming, walking, triathlon, charity challenges, clubs, and outdoor events. At the time of the rebuild, its catalog contained more than 6,000 active listings managed by an internal editorial team and a growing network of event partners.

As the catalog expanded, publishing capacity became a constraint. Partners needed more control over their listings, but giving them access to the full Kentico administration environment would have created unnecessary risk and complexity.

Client feedback

“One of the main reasons we continue to use the team is their can-do attitude and flexible working approach. They’re great people to work with.”  

Andrew Risbey, Founder at TimeOutdoors

Andrew rated Bits Orchestra 5.0 out of 5 for quality, schedule, cost, and willingness to refer. He also highlighted the team’s communication, flexibility, and ability to work effectively with TimeOutdoors’ in-house specialists.

Business challenge

TimeOutdoors' event catalog was growing faster than its team could publish it, and internal capacity — not partner readiness — was setting the pace of growth.

• Every listing needed a developer or the Kentico admin app, bottlenecking partner onboarding.
• Marketing time went into content operations instead of growth and personalization.
• Event URLs and content-tree pages ran on separate logic, complicating SEO and navigation.
• Origin-served media was starting to slow pages as the catalog expanded.

The platform needed to remove the developer dependency, unify routing, and get ahead of the performance cost of scale — without disrupting a live, revenue-generating business.

Why Bits Orchestra

TimeOutdoors selected Bits Orchestra for its Recognition as a top 3 Kentico partner in Eastern Europe, flexible delivery model, and ability to work alongside an internal product team.

The team used Kentico’s built-in capabilities where they fit and added custom functionality only where the client’s event and partner workflows required it.

Solution

Partners needed to manage full event listings — descriptions, media, scheduling, and pricing — not just add entries to a calendar. A standard calendar wasn't built for that, so the platform itself had to be extended:

• Partner editing interface — Bits Orchestra extended Kentico Xperience 13 with a simplified editing interface, giving partners the ability to create and manage listings without granting access to the full admin application.
• Unified routing — Event URLs resolve through a custom routing layer that checks the content tree first, then falls back to a dynamic route table for event-specific paths.
• E-commerce — Cart, orders, and payments for event registration, built on Kentico's e-commerce module.
• Personalization — Segmentation-based targeting to surface relevant events by visitor interest.
• Marketing automation — Workflow automation to reduce manual work for the marketing team.
• Media delivery — Served through CDN, with output and data caching at the page level and Kentico handling session and personalization data, reducing load on the origin server as the catalog grows.

Technical implementation

• Platform: Kentico Xperience 13 — the current major release at the time. Kentico has since introduced Xperience by Kentico as its current SaaS-first platform; this project predates that release and reflects the CMS generation available at the time.
• Framework: ASP.NET Core MVC.
• E-commerce, automation, personalization: Run on Kentico's built-in modules rather than third-party add-ons.
• Media delivery: CDN with multi-level caching.
• Payments: Handled through Stripe's hosted checkout, keeping cardholder data out of the application's PCI scope. 

Before and after

Summary

TimeOutdoors gained a faster way to manage event inventory, partner content, and online transactions. By combining Kentico’s native commerce, workflow, personalization, and search tools with custom partner publishing and routing, Bits Orchestra removed a publishing bottleneck without turning the platform into a difficult-to-maintain custom system. The same approach can support travel portals, activity marketplaces, destination platforms, and event businesses that need partners to manage inventory while the platform owner retains control over content, commerce, and customer experience.