CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

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

For ideas regarding Drupal-based solutions, see:

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

and

http://galleryrobinson.com/blog/ticketingforcivicrm

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:

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: 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?

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.

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?

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