CiviBoxOffice

[jcm55]

We've been using CiviCRM/CiviEvent for theatre ticket sales and patron database for a few years now.  All of our shows are general admission, and CiviCRM has worked reasonably well for us in this capacity.  I've even implemented some modifications around season tickets, ticket sales reports and etc -- unfortunately a lot of it outside of the CiviCRM framework, reading and writing to the backend MySQL database directly.

Our audience has reached a size where it's really necessary for us to switch to assigned seating for our upcoming season.  I've surveyed all of the available open-source box office software, and there's nothing that I would call "production ready."  FusionTicket is the closest -- it's based on an earlier effort called phpMyTicket.  The seat maps and administration interface are actually pretty slick, but the ecommerce/checkout interface is not, unfortunately. 

There are of course various SaaS box office solution vendors, but they all seem pretty costly, either to us directly, or to our patrons in the form of added ticket/order fees.  They'd also require us to manually import patron lists back into CiviCRM, with associated hassle and data loss potential.

What we'd really like to see is CiviBoxOffice -- in the form of an entirely new module, or as expanded CiviEvent functionality.  Our priorities are assigned seats and season tickets.  In our case, season tickets are in the form of a "flex pass" -- buy season ticket now, choose specific performance dates/times later.  Perhaps the assigned seating functionality could leverage some of the FusionTicket code, assuming it has a compatible open-source license.

We're willing to make a significant contribution to sponsor this, although due to scope/complexity, I don't think we could be the sole sponsor.  Wondering if there are other organizations out there who would be interested.

Thanks,

Jim Meehan
Bay Area Children's Theatre
(510) 296-4433

[Donald Lobo]

hey jim:

glad to hear of your success with civicrm Would be great if you can write it up as a case study / blog post

regarding box office stuff, the best way to kickstart this would be a more detailed blog post, briefly specing it out and potentially making the case for why it needs to be with CiviEvent and why using other potential open source solutions does not work. We do think that the blog posts get a wider audience and hence will catch user both internal and external to civicrm. Let me know if u are willing to do this, and i can enable blogging rights for you.

I checked FusionTicket license and it is GPL v3 which is compatible with the license we use AGPL v3. So we could potentially also share code with it as needed

lobo

[Hershel]

For ideas regarding Drupal-based solutions, see:

http://civicrm.org/blogs/hershel/civicrm-ticketing-and-attendance

and

http://galleryrobinson.com/blog/ticketingforcivicrm

[koensayr]

Has there been any thoughts or progress on this? I'd be curious to pickup some orphaned code if there is any available.

-Josh

[Hershel]

I have not done any further work on this subject. There is very little demand for a solution like this in CiviCRM, as far as I am aware.

[robinhood]

I would love to see CiviBoxOffice become a civievent extension, and would contribute to a community effort on it.  Civievent already contains most of the event setup and payment process that is needed.  However, there is a fair bit of complexity in dealing with assigned seating.  Here are a few issues that come to mind.

• One key is the functionality for creating/maintaining/displaying the seatmaps, and allowing the user to select from available seats by clicking checkboxes on a seatmap to make a purchase.  Many theatres would want to have multiple seatmaps available, either because they have zone seating (e.g., balcony vs orchestra level seating) or use flexible seating arrangements. 
• Some kind of temporary locking mechanism, so that seats cannot be double booked due to users trying to simultaneously book the same seats.
• The administrative interface has to be expanded to allow easy adding, deleting and editing seat reservations at the back end, such as for taking phone orders.  There also has to be a dead-simple POS interface for walk-ins.
• As Jim mentioned, dealing with season tickets and other pricing complexities.

That seems like a non-trivial project in terms of development resources.  However once completed it would be a huge win for community theatres.

[Donald Lobo]

robinhood:

would your org be interested in helping seed the MIH? Lets assume its a 200 hour effort, would your org be willing to fund 50-100 hours of this work?

lobo

[EdP]

Just on the last point - are season tickets not essentially a type of membership in all practical effects? CiviDiscount can provide discounts (as a value or percentage) to people with set membership types so you may have some of the work there done for you already (albeit that CiviDiscount isn't 100% working on 4.2 itself).

We treat purchase of a rowing boat racking space as a membership. It isn't really but since it is personal to a person, and time limited it works much the same way. The same must apply for season tickets too? Presumably they (like memberships) can be personal or per-family?

E

[robinhood]

@EdP: Yes that makes sense.  Which takes me back to my first answer that the key missing pieces involve the seating arrangements.

@dlobo:  Well getting a complete answer to that will take some time involving committees, budgets and such like.  But how about this  - I can commit to providing some amount of seed money even if I have to raise it from other interested parties.  And surely others here will also step up to help.  What would be needed to start the process?

[koensayr]

I would certainly be willing to fund something like this through a MIH project.

[Dave Greenberg]

We would need a commitment of approx $10k to kick off an MIH for this functionality (~50% of the estimated cost). Hopefully several of you who've expressed interest can pool resources - this would be a great addition to the platform.

[jsimonis]

This sounds like it would be a great addition. I know there has been a number of people looking for something similar - choosing workshops and it tracking when they're full.

At this point I would just be happy for CiviDiscounts to work. I have yet to get it to work at all.

[EdP]

Think that's a bit harsh...events already know when they are full (and do waitlists too, if needed). You can also sell blocks with pricesets - tables of 10 for a dinner, for example. It's just specific seating (matters to a cinema, maybe for seating plans at dinners, but not so much most other events) that events doesn't currently do, surely?

[jcm55]

Assigned seating functionality is still a high priority for Bay Area Children's Theatre.

I've looked at FusionTicket in the past (mentioned earlier in this thread) and it covers most of the functionality described by robinhood including creating and maintaining seat maps, customer seat selection interface, temporary locking and backend admin interface.  Lobo has in the past verified that FusionTicket and Civi have compatible open source licenses, so I think there's a good possibility for code reuse here.

I am checking to see if BACT can make a significant commitment to MIH seed money for this.

[Donald Lobo]

In general for all MIH's we've done so far (and i suspect Joe Murray has similar experiences), we basically spend at least 33-66% more hours than we've originally spec'ed / costed

software development unfortunately takes a fair bit of time. Might want to check ohloh on some civicrm stats / $$$ figure

http://www.ohloh.net/p/civicrm

Generalizing and coming up with a seating model that will work for most orgs is not trivial, IMO. If we can integrate fusionticket with civicrm the costs will potentially be a lot lower assuming FT has relatively decent integration points

lobo