Theatre Sites – Ticket booking system

I’ve been working with Theatre Sites for several months on a fairly complex ticket booking system that has presented a number of technical challenges.

The finished product will likely power ticket selection and purchase for thousands of shows in Theatres across the country.

The main LAMP Stack application uses an API to interact with a ticketing database to get information on every aspect of a performance, from dates to ticket availability and price.

The main challenge has been dealing with the XML returned by the API as all of the information in the ticketing database is fully normalised, as one would expect. So a bulk of the work has involved building functions to deal with large interconnected arrays of data to output a usable screens worth of content.

Much of the data fed from the API Can be cached, which is useful, however because seat availability and pricing changes in real time these feeds have to be incorporated with the cached data, which can be fiddly.

A great project to work on and fun, most of the time.