Justatic | Alasdair Boyd

www.justatic.com (Inactive)

When?

Never really finished but close to it around December 2009

Why?

My Mum has been an actor, playwright and director of amateur theatre from well before I was even born. In 2009 she was the president of the Lieder Theatre in Goulburn and she rang me one night and asked me if I would be able to build the theatre a system to enable them to sell tickets for their plays across multiple locations (ie; over the phone, over the counter and online). I immediately thought it would be a fun project to work on and I immediately thought of the opportunity of creating a hosted Theatre Ticket Management system that the Lieder Theatre could use but that I could also sell to many other theatres across the country.

What?

The Lieder Theatre is a small community theatre and they didn’t have any way for patrons to purchase tickets online. They sold their tickets through the local Chemist in Goulburn and then any tickets that were not sold were delivered by the chemist to the theatre for sale on the night of the performance! They needed a better solution and that’s what I planned on building for them!

I created a site that would be provided to many theatres, that enabled them to create productions and performances, seating plans etc and for users anywhere (with internet access) to sell tickets on their behalf to the performances. There was an entire reporting system built into it (of course because I love reporting) which provided them in depth information about their ticket sales and other interesting things!

The Lieder actually used it for their last production of 2009 although it wasn’t 100% complete. I never actually got around to making it look nice but it was very functional. I could have paid a designer to spruce it up and it wouldn’t be a bad little product. In the end though they needed online payments quicker than I could provide and they were approached by another online ticket sales business and they decided to go with them rather than what I had built.

How?

The site is written in PHP using Codeigniter with a MySQL database. There was a heap of JQuery in this site – too much really – as I made every single action on the site an AJAX request! I thought it would make it sexier but all it really did was make my development job 100x harder! I created it from scratch and designed/developed every aspect myself.