Danish Trade Council Business Event Platform

Web application built for the Danish State Visit to Croatia, a 3-day business event in Zagreb (October 2014) organized by the Embassy of Denmark. The platform connected Danish and Croatian business people: companies registered profiles, browsed participants by sector, requested tailor-made services from the Danish Trade Council, and checked the event schedule with seminars, group events, and one-on-one meetings.

I ran the technical side of this project from start to finish: requirements gathering with the Danish Trade Council (calls and in-person meetings), the complete Django backend, and a large chunk of the frontend. Initial frontend work was coordinated with an external developer, making it a small team effort.

The admin side is where most of the complexity lived. Organizers needed to manage companies, representatives, business sectors, rooms, schedules, and service requests all from one place. I built a templated emailing system right inside the admin, with variable substitution ({full_name}, {company}, {email}), HTML and plain text variants, reusable attachments, email logs, and the ability to fire off emails directly from a representative’s detail page via a dropdown of templates. Other admin customizations: drag-and-drop reordering for sector hierarchies, autocomplete filters on list views, color-coded status fields, hover-to-reveal extra info, custom mass actions, XLSX export (not CSV), and a dashboard with tabbed sales/analytics graphs.

PDF generation was handled on the fly. Some pages (like participant lists split by country) could be downloaded as branded PDFs, generated dynamically from the current data using a third-party rendering service.

The user-facing app was responsive with progressive enhancement. All interactive views (company details, service ordering) worked as popups with JavaScript enabled, but also as full standalone pages without it. The register/login/forgot-password flow, profile editing, service requests with approval statuses, and a schedule viewer with room and time filtering.

After the original event, the project pivoted into a reusable platform and lives on as urbandanish.solutions. The same codebase has since powered over a dozen Danish trade and business matchmaking events across the region: smart cities, water, health, waste, agriculture, and island sustainability events in Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Albania, and Montenegro, running from 2017 through 2021.

django-admin dashboard with two tabbed graphs (sales and Google analytics)

Different models and utilities on the admin dashboard

The GA graph

List view of users (a.k.a. “representatives”), showing a few custom fields (link to company, color-coded status field, last edit info), and also showing a custom auto-complete filter in action

Inline view of representatives, showing a dropdown with available email templates

About to send a pre-populated email, using one of the templates

Emails have an optional HTML content, and attachment slots

Popups all the way down – editing a company -> sending an email to a user -> adding a new attachment (attachments can later be re-used)

Simple “mock” hierarchy pattern, with drag & drop feature

After drag & drop operation, there appears a reminder to click “Save” (blue box at the very bottom), and if user tries to leave, a confirmation message appears (the message happens for any unsaved changes throughout the admin)

A few inline objects, showing a custom “Save to delete” message

Another list view, with additional info shown on hover. Also visible are mass action buttons in the bottom bar.

Exported data to Excel (.XLSX, not .CSV)

Filling out a meeting data, with autocomplete in action

Admin (staff) users are separated from other users.

Emails, sent and drafts

Email logs, read-only

A small CMS-like feature

The CMS feature in action (frontend)

Files that are offered as “Download PDF” buttons throughout the site. Some are fixed, and others are generated dynamically from the page content (pre-generated using a third party service).