CiviBoxOffice

[jcm55]

BACT can commit $3000 to MIH seed money for this.

[koensayr]

Is the contribution Tax Deductible and going to a non-profit?

[Dave Greenberg]

No - most MIH money that comes in online is not tax deductible although it does sustain the CiviCRM project. However, for donors who are considering larger contributions and who need tax deductibility - we can generally arrange this through our non-profit partner Progressive Technology Project.

[Goodman]

I have designed several ticketing systems and ticketing features in the past. If I can answer any questions, don't hesitate to holler :-)!

[koensayr]

I believe there has been some agreement here. Broadway By the Bay and its supporters would be willing to put up the remaining 4 to 5K to make this happen and get the ball rolling. I think something like 6k has already been pledged. If other development re-sources are required (servers, bandwidth, computers etc) BBBay may be able to help there as well. While I'm not super familiar with the Civi Code base, I'd be happy to volunteer to write some code myself, given some direction.

We are putting together our season for the 2013 year, and using another ticketing system outside of Civi is just terrible! It forces us to do double entry, and deal with additional surcharges for tickets.

In the event that there is some run over, we can participate in other fund raising exercises or contribute extra funding.

I'm not a huge fan of Fusion Tickets. We've tried it. The UI and the interface itself is terrible, but perhaps some of the backend logic would be able to be re-used. I haven't seen Fusion support subscriptions, which is really key for us.

I'd like to suggest the first two features:

* Seat Maps uploaded in SVG format (will enable jquery, node.js and jvectormap visualizations)
* Support for Subscriptions. The idea being a patron pays a discounted rate, but gets tickets to a block of shows or events

-Josh

[andrewhunt]

In the interests of providing frameworks that will be useful to others, I'd like to point out that seats are no different than tables for one.  In other words, this project is ultimately to take event registrants and attach them to a predefined slot.  Many organizations have banquets, and they want to be able to assign groups to tables, so the process of keeping four registrants from a family or organization together at a table is no different than keeping them in the same row.  Putting people at the head table vs. a regular table is like seeing if they should be in the orchestra level or the balcony.  Booking an entire table is a straightforward extension of the idea.

I was talking with Michael and Frank at the most recent DC meetup--they have a volunteer feature they're wanting to advance, and it's very similar: people sign up as volunteers for an event, and they're either automatically or manually placed in volunteer slots. 

Ultimately, the idea of a seat is pretty broadly useful for a lot of new directions people would like to go with events.  From a fundraising as well as an extensibility perspective, I think it would be good to abstract it just a little to accommodate these other features that put event participants into prearranged slots.

[Donald Lobo]

would be great if someone can do an analysis / review of existing systems and how they handle various seating arrangements / configurations etc.

we tried checking and getting some info from fusion tickets, but their website and model (open source, but pay for access to latest version?) does not seem to give you a lot of info

i think as with everything else, the key lies in striking a balance between generalizations and meeting the specific use cases in a easy manner

lobo

[MacRonin]

It looks like someone ( jcm55 - Bay Area Children's Theatre ) may have started the integration process between CiviCRM and FusionTicket

http://drupal.org/sandbox/jcm55/1806044

I'm not sure how far along they are since the just created the Sandbox on Oct 7th,2012

This module provides the ability to create seat maps and assign them to CiviCRM events. Attendees can select seats during event registration, with selected seats shown on Confirmation and ThankYou pages. Seat maps and seat assignment are handled via integration with FusionTicket (a 3rd party GPL / PHP application).

[johnd]

As one of, if not the only magazine that adapted CiviCRM for subscriptions, The Monthly is also intending on adapting CiviBoxOffice with the seat map feature for advertising bookings.

Advertising bookings are basically the same as paid events. Also, advertising page plans (otherwise called flat plans) are a similar concept to seat maps.

The terminology is the only real difference I can think of: e.g. Event = Advertisement, Seat = Page or Ad Slot

I wonder if the word replacement setting in Civi work with this planned feature?

We have a great interest in CiviBoxOffice and I will organise a contribution to the MIH project.

[jcm55]

I hadn't noticed the new activity on this thread, until Dave Greenberg emailed me about possibly discussing this at the CiviCRM meetup in San Francisco on Oct 25.  I will definitely be there.

In the mean time, I have made significant progress on the CiviCRM <-> FusionTicket integration.  You can read more in my blog post here:

http://civicrm.org/blogs/jcm55/seat-maps-and-assigned-seating-civicrm-events

I've uploaded my initial code base to a Drupal project here:

http://drupal.org/sandbox/jcm55/1806044

The project includes the full FusionTicket code base in an "installed" state, meaning that it's expecting a fusionticket database to exist with the proper tables.  To get this working, you'll need to create a fusionticket database, and then populate it with fusionticket/includes/install/base_sql.sql and possibly fusionticket/includes/install/demo_sql.sql.  Then edit fusionticket/includes/config/init_config.php and put in the appropriate db user/pass.

Let me know if it's unworkable as is and I'll see about whipping it into some kind of shape where I can get some collaborators.

Also, live demo here:

https://test.bactheatre.org/db/civicrm/event/register?id=360&reset=1

Use discount code GRATIS for 100% discount to complete registration without entering credit card info.

Looking forward to seeing folks at the SF meetup next week.

[robinhood]

Awesome!  I will have to start looking at fusionticket.

[mnt_schred]

I would also suggest targeting on integration with fusionticket.
I've implemented and kept this current for a project I did the webservices/website for: kunstomhetlijf.nl

fusionticket is a very active project and has a good development rate.

It can be complex however to handle the contacts from fusionticket in civi, but we could start a topic in http://fusionticket.org/index.php/kunena/index as well, trying to achieve this.

[Donald Lobo]

mnt_schred:

can u describe a bit more on what type of integration u did with fusionticket? can u share the integration code u created

lobo

[jcm55]

I've done some more work on this and converted it from a Drupal module into a CiviCRM extension that should work under any CMS.  You can grab the latest from github here:

https://github.com/jamescmeehan/org.bactheatre.civiboxoffice

The INSTALL.txt does a decent job of telling you how to set it up.

[robinhood]

Can you comment on where this is going?  Wondering if you are basically forking fusionticket, or is the intention to maintain patches to keep in sync as FT evolves?  I am only asking because FT is a big project on its own, and this version is in beta so its quality is somewhat unknown.  Sooner or later the question will arise, hey, can we get those latest FT patches into CiviBoxOffice?