“72h con la maniche in su” is an annual volunteering event organized by PDMN that takes place in Venice. The event targets 16-30 year olds, who can participate either by themself or by joining a group of friends. The subscriber doesn’t know what volunteering project he will be assigned to and the destination will be kept secret until the very first day of the event.

For the second year now, I have been in charge of the IT infrastructure, creating the management software that has been our best friend for several months.

The software has been written in the latest PHP version on the Laravel framework. All of this is on top of an apache web server in a purchased Cloud Linux server.

Since the development of event related websites is pretty fast paced, a development environment was mandatory. It is reachable by a dedicated third level domain and it is linked to a separate testing database. Once the number of subscribers has reached 800+ people, creating a better modern subscription infrastructure has become mandatory.

The website allows people to subscribe during fixed time periods. Once the registration form has been submitted, the users can upload two PDF documents which will be manually reviewed by the admins. Each document can be either approved or rejected; in the latter case the user will be notified and asked to solve the issue. Once the subscription period is over and the documents are approved, the admins start to assign users and groups to each project. That is done through a extremely quick drag-and-drop operation.

All the participants do receive a final participation digital PDF certificate, dynamically generated by the website. Each document, which is then given to the subscriber’s school to certificate the volunteering period, contains a tamper-proof verification QR.

The website also provides a form to leave a feedback. It will be useful for the next edition.

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Extra features:

• PDF certificate with tamper-proof QR
• Dynamic VCS contact file generation
• MailChimp integration for automatic notifications
• Slack integration
• Daily backup
• Anti DDOS mitigation
• Stats
• Database record encryption