Adding your entourage, ninong and ninang

The entourage is the part of a Filipino wedding website that generic tools handle worst, so it is the part Nupta puts the most structure behind.

The groups you start with

Nupta offers the standard groups, and you switch on the ones you are using:

• Principal sponsors — your ninong and ninang, listed in pairs
• Secondary sponsors — the cord, veil and candle pairs, each its own group rather than lumped together
• Parents of the bride and parents of the groom
• Maid or matron of honour, best man, bridesmaids and groomsmen
• Bearers — ring, coin, bible — and flower girls
• Officiant

You are not limited to these. Group names and role names are free text, so if your family uses a title that is not on the list, type it.

Pairs

Principal and secondary sponsors are traditionally listed as pairs, and the editor gives each pair two fields. On the published page a pair is shown as two names stacked together.

If you only know one half of a pair yet, leave the other blank and fill it in later. A half-filled pair prints just the name you entered — it will not leave a stray ampersand on the page.

Your entourage is not your guest list

This catches people out, so it is worth stating plainly: adding someone to your entourage does not add them to your guest list, and the two are kept deliberately separate.

They serve different purposes. Your entourage is a page your guests read. Your guest list is your seat and meal count. A ninong who is named on the page but cannot come to the reception should be on one and not the other, and an earlier version that kept them in sync created hundreds of duplicate guests before it was removed.

So add people to both when they belong to both — it takes a moment, and it means your headcount stays honest.

Ordering and the number of pairs

Two to four pairs of principal sponsors is traditional; ten or more is common now. Nupta does not cap it.

List them in the order you want them read. That order is usually a family decision rather than an alphabetical one, and it is the kind of thing people notice.

Check your spellings

These are other people's names, printed under their role, in front of everyone they know. It is the single most-read part of the page, and the one place a typo is genuinely awkward.

If you are printing a ceremony program, the entourage page is generated from exactly this data — so fixing a name here fixes it everywhere.