How it works

A village face on a shared engine

burwellvillage.org.uk runs on Typomania Core — the framework behind the rest of this portfolio — but it deliberately looks like none of the others. The public pages have their own layout, navigation, footer and stylesheet, with none of the framework's standard chrome showing through.

What's worth noting is how that was done: without changing a line of the framework. Typomania's rule is that a domain's own copy of a file is used in preference to the core's, so the entire custom front-end is a handful of override files dropped into Burwell's folder — its own navigation, footer, homepage and a stylesheet scoped so tightly it can only ever affect the public pages. The admin area still wears the stock framework UI; only the public face is the village's own.

The problem: local listings rot

The real project sits behind that front-end. In any village, the facts about what's on are scattered and perishable. Burwell's are spread across a parish-council page, the community magazine (Clunch), individual clubs' own websites, calendar feeds, and paper posters in shop windows. The magazine is the richest source and the slowest — by the time an issue is printed, some of the events it lists have already happened. A what's-on page typed up by hand from those sources is out of date the week after someone stops maintaining it.

Many ways in, one pipeline

So the site is built to take events and news from where they already are, rather than wait for them to be re-typed. Several capture lanes feed one pipeline:

• Poster submission. From the homepage, anyone can submit a photo of an event poster. The image is read by a vision-capable AI model (Claude), which pulls out the title, date, time and venue and drafts an event from it — turning a JPEG off a noticeboard into a structured listing.
• The community magazine. Clunch's PDF is ingested, its text extracted and cleaned, and candidate events and news items pulled from the prose for review.
• Local websites. Organisations' own sites are scanned for events, so a club that posts to its own page doesn't have to report anything to anyone.
• Calendar feeds. Where an organisation already publishes an iCal feed, it's discovered and pulled in directly.

A draft is not a publication

Every lane ends the same way: a draft, held back from public view, that a person reviews and approves before it appears. An automated parser — AI or otherwise — never publishes anything itself; it only ever proposes. Events resolve their venue against a large database of local places, so "the Fox" becomes a real address rather than a free-text guess. A separate news section, launched recently, works the same way: parish-council items can be linked out to their original source, while longer pieces drawn from the magazine become internal articles — each one a reviewed draft before it runs.