CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My wife runs a theatre company, and I have them set up with CiviCRM for keeping track of patrons, season subscribers and donors.  It does a really excellent job in that role, and colleagues of hers who run other theatre companies in the area drool at the functionality

In the past, the venue that they perform at has required them to use a certain ticketing provider that has rather high fees.  Looks like they will be released from that requirement next season though, and they can do their own ticketing if they like.  I've been looking around for a good open source online ticket sales solution.  There is nothing out there other than phpMyTicket which hasn't seen any active development since 2005 and isn't ready for prime time in my opinion.

I'd really love to be able to use CiviEvent as a ticket sales solution.  The existing integration with PayPal WPP is really compelling.  The problem is that a theatre performance isn't quite an "event" in the CiviEvent sense.  For example, we'd like "event participants" (theatre patrons) to be able to specify that they want 2 adult and 3 child "registrations" (tickets) and pay for them all at once.  We just need the "participant data" for the purchaser -- there's no need to collect data for the other people they might be buying tickets for.

All of the shows are general admission, so there's no need for seat assignments or anything like that.  We can have folks present a printout of the confirmation e-mail or screen as their physical tickets.  All of the performances are for children (and their families) so ticket security/forgery is not a major concern

Has anyone else out there considered using CiviEvent in this kind of scenario?  I'm considering diving into the modifications myself -- if there's other interest that might make me a little more motivated.

Since the seats are general admission and therefore you don't need to make specific seat assignments or ID the other ticket holders, The "Price Sets" function may be enough for what you want. It allows a single transaction to purchase more than one type of item for an event

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Price+Sets

This page is from the planning docs, so there is probably a better description of what is currently live. But I don't remember off-hand where that is, even though I have tested it. But this should be enough to get you thinking.

Wow, that's nearly perfect! 

I made a price set that included two text fields:  "Child" and "Adult."  Is there any way to get a summary or report for an event so we can see how many of each have been sold?  I see that you can do a participant search and limit by event, and the "Fee Level" column shows the Price Set options for each participant, but I didn't see a way to sum those numbers for the event overall.

The results of "Find Participants" do show the price set data in the "Fee Level" column.  However, when you export the results, the "Fee Level" column seems to contain the event name.  A bug maybe?

Okay, I opened CRM-2577 opened for this.