The Artisan Center Theater is the #1 Community Theater in the USA, with more than 10 shows a year. They are rooted deep in the local community of Dallas-Fort-Worth, with hundreds of audience members a year, most of which are season ticket holders! Their non-profit team, headed by Rick Blair, run a tight ship, engaging local artists to perform in their amazing shows. There is no lack of talent in the area, and that shows by the quality of their productions, stage designs, and special effects!
Chris and his team flew to Dallas and met Rick and his team in person at the Community Theater. At the time they used an old-school ticketing software called WinTix + WebTix. The multi-day meeting uncovered design flaw problems that consistently resulted in double booking of nearly every seat at every show. Artisan worked with Chris and his team to define a completely new way of managing their tickets. Their needs also included an interactive seating chart. This was the start of the wildly popular OpenTickets project.
From the ground up, Chris rebuilt this Community Theater website and ticketing system. Innovative ticket creation and management was at the core of the suite of tools Chris created for the Artisan team. Features they had never seen, like mobile-compatible interactive ticket selection, were implemented with ease, with Chris as the sole engineer. He also setup and managed their hosting for years, and went through one drastic site recovery for minute granularity backups, caused by natural disaster.
Highlights from Services Provided to the Community Theater
Development & Implementation
- New site design
- Complete rewrite of the event ticketing system
- Custom image sliders and image presentations
- Specialized custom post types (CPTs) for events, seasons, promos and more
- Improved site speed and stability
- Admin tools for content publishing and event management
- Custom event search algorithm
- POS system invention for in-person payments right from WordPress admin
- Business intelligence reporting tools
- Customer Relationship Management tooling built into WordPress admin
- many, many more features
Maintenance
- Daily updates and improvements
- Lifetime free license and updates for OpenTickets
- Iterative improvements on site speed
- 1-minute granularity backups and recoveries
- Hosting setup and management
- Third-party service replacements and improvements
Security
- Comprehensive WordPress security analysis & report
- Server & Services setup and routine auditing
- Password policy creation & enforcement
- Firewall level client blocking
- Round the clock security monitoring
Custom Themes & Plugins
- Completely custom, high-availability tuned theme
- Admin improvements for staff efficiency at the box office of the community theater
- Caching & security plugins
- Multiple image presentation improvements
- Site organization and optimization plugins
Hosting Setup
- Evaluation of hosting costs
- Migration of hosting providers
- AWS account setup and management
- Configuration of N+2 AWS Auto-Scaling & EC2
- Integration of CDN