How a Bilingual City Guide Models Recurring and One-Off Events Differently

A developer building a bilingual city guide for Santa Cruz de la Sierra documented the challenges of modeling two fundamentally different event types: dated one-off occurrences and open-ended recurring events. Treating both as a single database row with a date column causes recurring events to silently disappear when past-event filters use a date threshold, and workarounds like sentinel future dates corrupt sorting and querying logic. The solution involves splitting the two types with an explicit discriminator, reflected visibly in URL slugs — dated events carry an ISO date and random suffix for uniqueness, while recurring events use a stable marker like '-weekly' with no date. On the structured data side, schema.org's EventSeries with a Schedule node is the correct representation for recurring events, as a plain Event with a fabricated date makes a false machine-readable assertion about a specific occurrence. The guide also maintains fully localized URL path segments for its Spanish mirror, going beyond simple locale prefixes to improve regional search relevance at the cost of a more complex routing table.