Ticketing/event sales system?

fyankai · 2009-02-04 14:02:18

Hi All

Is there any way to sell tickets (eg for events) though TXP? I can’t seem to find a plugin that does it. If there’s not one, what are the other options for selling tickets through a website? Anyone know of any good online services that would plug in to TXP?

Thanks loads for any help

Frank

the_ghost · 2009-02-04 14:20:52

Did you look to yab_shop plugin? It has nice paypal integrity – look for this demo and visit devoted to yab_shop forum thread

fyankai · 2009-02-04 16:08:38

That looks good, but I don’t think it has all the functionality I need. Two things that I need are:

1) The ability to choose events by date

2) The ability to show how many tickets are left, and display “Sold out” when there are none.

As far as I can tell, this isn’t possible with yab_shop. Does anyone know the best way to approach this?

Bloke · 2009-02-04 23:57:18

fyankai wrote:

The ability to choose events by date

Isn’t that a separate feature from being able to order tickets? (aside from the “sold out” part?) Not sure if it helps, but smd_calendar shows articles (as events) on a calendar, so for managing your upcoming gigs/events/whatever it’d work quite well.

The ability to show how many tickets are left, and display “Sold out” when there are none.

yab_shop will not do this at the moment because (I believe) there is no reliable trigger buit into it or the 3rd party APIs that can indicate a transaction has completed successfully. If someone goes to — for example — PayPal and prepares to buy N tickets but cancels the transaction at the last step, you need to be sure those N tickets remain available. Similarly, if the transaction completes and is accepted (i.e. is not fraudulent/cancelled) you need the number of tickets to decrement at that point.

Thus you cannot:

decrement a counter prior to the transaction
decrement a counter from a link that can be called directly from the browser

which limits your options at the moment unless you go for an entirely 3rd party solution that has integrated payments and/or a reliable session-tracked trigger; perhaps one that can forward you to a “secure” location and pass some data forward, whereby the number of tickets purchased can be decremented from, say, a custom field in that “event” (article).

If you use a custom field to hold the remaining ticket count then detecting ‘sold out’ is easy with the smd_if plugin. But the whole issue of keeping this field up-to-date is going to depend on database transaction level locking unless you can guranatee that only one person is ever going to buy a ticket at any one instant. MySQL can do it natively (I think) if you choose a different type of database management system (e.g. InnoDB); not sure if TXP works with it or not.

I’m not meaning to rain on your parade or anything, but you may need to look for a 3rd party event management solution (are there any? I can’t find one that’s open source or available for free download) instead of trying to make TXP work that way. Or go in with your PHP guns blazing and some transactional database experience :-)

P.S. if you do find a way, I’d be interested to know how you eventually made it work.

Last edited by Bloke (2009-02-04 23:58:08)

fyankai · 2009-02-09 13:36:43

Wow, smd_calendar looks great – will definitely have some uses for that!

Yeah it’s looking like doing this through plugins isn’t going to work. My own programming skills definitely aren’t up to it!

Someone in another forum has suggested a couple of paid-for event systems:

http://www.eventwax.com/
http://www.stubmatic.com/

but these both involve sending people to an external site (and then on to PayPal), which isn’t ideal. You also need to be doubling up event information (once on your TXP site, once in theirs), which isn’t great.

So… Does anyone know of a 3rd party event management system that’d work well with TXP? A paid-for, hosted service might even be ok if they had an API that would let me pull the event data into TXP. (Although I guess you then miss out on being able to include it in site search…)

Any ideas?

Thanks again!

jakob · 2009-02-09 14:47:55

Maybe a two-part solution with txp for the event management and something like wufoo (also not free) for the forms and payment handling. You can include the wufoo form in an iframe in your site (you can also make your own css file for wufoo to make it match your site), and I believe you can also pre-populate parts of the form too (e.g. the event name or ID) via the URL (as mentioned here).

Wufoo passes payment on to paypal (for example) and records if the transaction was completed. It also has an API. You could perhaps query the number of paid tickets via the API, compare it with the number of tickets on sale (which you’d set as a custom-field in txp) and then display an appropriate message when only a few tickets remain and remove the link to the form once the tickets are sold out.

I’ve not tried any of this, so it’s just thinking aloud. If you use it, get back to us with a detailed write-up.

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#1 2009-02-04 14:02:18

Ticketing/event sales system?

#2 2009-02-04 14:20:52

Re: Ticketing/event sales system?

#3 2009-02-04 16:08:38

Re: Ticketing/event sales system?

#4 2009-02-04 23:57:18

Re: Ticketing/event sales system?

#5 2009-02-09 13:36:43

Re: Ticketing/event sales system?

#6 2009-02-09 14:47:55

Re: Ticketing/event sales system?

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