The Supper Club is a Dunedin institution. One night a year the Town Hall fills, the city's restaurants and venues host tables, guests bid in live and online auctions, and everything raised goes to Ronald McDonald House Charities New Zealand, which houses families while their child is in hospital. The 2025 event raised $415,000. More than three million dollars since 2010, and 2026 is the fifteenth.
The website has to do three jobs at once, and they change as the year goes on. Before the event it sells the night and the cause, and gives table supporters, restaurant and venue hosts and auction donors a clear way in. During the build-up it carries the detail for the current event, this year Thursday 15 October 2026. Afterwards it becomes the record, with a gallery for every event back to 2021 and the background on the charity, the patrons and why the night exists at all.
This year we built them a custom plugin so the Supper Club committee and Jitter Design, who look after their content, can run the site between them, without a developer in the loop. The sponsors are where that matters most. The Supper Club runs on the generosity of local businesses, and there are a lot of them: a library of 240, of which 167 appear on the 2026 event across Platinum, Gold, Silver, Pre-function, Dining Destinations and Table Supporters, with auction and raffle sections ready when they are needed. Sponsors are records kept once and attached to whichever events they support, rather than names retyped into a page every year.
Each section is theirs to arrange. Drag to reorder and the order sticks for that event, set a heading or leave it to the default, drop in a full-width banner, and empty sections simply do not appear. Headings take a {year} token so they write themselves, and any sponsor can be overridden for one event without touching the record everyone else sees.
None of that would be much use if it only lived in the admin, so the plugin ships its own Elementor widgets. Event and sponsor blocks drop onto any page, and they follow the current event automatically rather than being pointed at one by hand.
Rolling into a new year is three steps: duplicate last year's event, point Current at the new one, and the outgoing event archives itself into Previous Events, taking the home page's gallery buttons with it. Dates can sit as TBA until confirmed, and the two buttons under every event hero live in one settings screen rather than being repeated on each page.
Flatout has built and hosted the site under sponsorship since 2022. It is a good night for a good cause, in our own city.