A local community-run cinema was set up last year (2013) in my town. They have a website and their ticketing is handled by Ticket Source.
I found the listings on the website hard to navigate and not organised or categorised in any way. So what to do? Mash it up, of course.
Taking a feed from Ticket Source, a bit of Twitter bootstrap and wrapping it all up in Laravel, I put this together in a couple of hours:
It just takes the feed, extracts the categories and classifications, then presents it again. The layout is unashamedly vanilla bootstrap, but I’m just playing, and it is mobile-friendly, which is vital these days. They are live feeds though, so feel free to explore, and maybe visit the cinema if you are in the area.
So what next? Ideally, Ticket Source would expand their API and make it easier to add custom fields. APIs can only be a good thing if your data is there to bring people in for a sale. Jam Jar Cinema – make it easy-peasy for people to find out what is on, when it’s on. Give them calendar views, RSS data feeds, email subscriptions, and classify the posts so they can go look for what is appropriate for their age and interests. In the end it is all about the data – the organisation and then the presentation of the data. By splitting those two concepts, you can do magical things with the data later.
Get in touch if you would like any help.
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