How We Streamlined Venue Data Management in Next.js with Centralized Configuration

The Problem: Chaos in Venue UIs

When we started rebuilding AustinsElite in Laravel 12, one thing became painfully obvious: every venue page felt like its own island. Colors? All over the place. Feature availability? Hardcoded in components. Branding consistency? A dream. We had over 200 venues, each with slightly different UI treatments, and the logic to control them was scattered across pages, components, and even CSS files.

Worse, when marketing wanted to toggle a feature — say, hide the reservation widget for certain locations — we had to dig through Git history or drop into code reviews just to flip a boolean. And don’t get me started on theming. Want a venue to use a custom primary color? That meant overriding CSS variables, adding className hacks, and praying nothing broke in SSR.

This wasn’t scalable. We needed a single source of truth — something that could define not just what a venue looks like, but what it can do.

The Solution: A Config That Does It All

We introduced venue.config.ts — a centralized, type-safe configuration file that now drives everything venue-related in the app. At its core, it’s a simple map:

const VenueConfig = {
  'austin-downtown': {
    name: 'Austin Downtown',
    theme: {
      primary: '#FF6F61',
      secondary: '#0A2540',
      font: 'Clash Display',
    },
    features: {
      reservations: true,
      events: false,
      membershipPortal: true,
    },
    seo: {
      title: 'Premium Lounge in Downtown Austin',
      description: 'Luxury nightlife experience with rooftop views...',
    },
  },
  // ...200+ more
} as const;

This config is imported at the root layout level and injected into React Context. From there, our components read from it dynamically. No more hardcoded colors. No more guessing which features are live.

But we didn’t stop at variables. We tied this config directly into our generateStaticParams and generateMetadata functions in Next.js. Now, every venue’s theme, features, and SEO metadata are generated at build time — fully static, fully optimized.

We even built a small runtime guard hook:

function useFeature(feature: keyof typeof features) {
  const { features } = useVenueConfig();
  return features[feature];
}

So in any component, it’s just:

{useFeature('reservations') && <ReservationWidget />}

Clean. Predictable. No surprises.

Impact: From Fragile to Future-Proof

The change landed today, and the difference is immediate. We cut down venue-specific CSS by 70%. New venues can now be spun up in minutes — just add an entry to the config, and the entire UI, theming, and feature set comes online automatically.

But the real win? Consistency with flexibility. We can enforce brand standards (e.g., all venues must use one of five approved fonts) while still allowing custom overrides where needed. Marketing can now run A/B tests on feature visibility by toggling flags in the config — no deploys required.

We also aligned the config with our backend schema dump, ensuring frontend expectations match API responses. This caught several outdated fields early and reduced runtime errors during hydration.

And because everything is type-safe, our IDE autocomplete knows what theme.primary should be for ‘austin-legacy’ — no more digging through Figma or Slack threads.

This refactor wasn’t just about cleaner code — it was about enabling velocity. We’re no longer bottlenecked by UI inconsistencies or manual overrides. When we roll out a new component, it works everywhere, styled correctly, behind the right flags.

Centralized configuration isn’t a new idea, but in a dynamic, content-heavy app like AustinsElite, it’s transformative. It turned a maintenance nightmare into a system that scales — not just in size, but in developer joy.

If you’re wrestling with inconsistent UIs or scattered feature logic in your Laravel 12 app, ask yourself: What if all that lived in one file? You might be surprised how much simpler everything gets.