iantearle.com

On Selling Tickets

Building products is great fun. Even better if you can build them quickly and successfully. I have been building a lot of products recently, one of note is TicketGun, a super simple, easy and quick way for anyone to sell tickets online with TicketGun. Here is short story of how I built this latest product.

TicketGun was built to be fast, secure and blissfully simple. If it’s not any of those things then the very people it is built for are not going to use it.
Security wise particularly when it comes to money we chose one of the industry emerging giants in online transactions; Stripe, they are super easy for developers to integrate into products, apps and services, Stripe built their service with security at the forefront and you can be assured that your money and transactions will be safe, and especially your card details will be looked after, encrypted with the highest of algorithms and techniques. It was a no brainer to make this choice.

I develop with PHP, a well tested, secure and fast technology in today’s web. At the start of TicketGun I built my own routing system, but early on in the project it was clear we needed something a little more powerful to handle paths and locations throughout the app. We chose a simple framework in the form of Slim.
Slim has allowed us to easily add locations and services with ease, enabling us to concentrate on the functionality of selling tickets online. We designed TicketGun to enable users to get set up and started in minutes, every new TicketGun user needs a Stripe account - which in itself takes moments to signup, once entered, the two step set up process asks for details of your first event. Hit save and your ready to start accepting ticket sales right away.

At the heart of the product design lies Composer a dependency manager for PHP - without it development time could have been doubled. With it we are able to quickly select packages to use, and we even built a couple of our own to include and use. It’s inclusion is valuable to any product.
We deploy our builds to live servers using Capistrano an automation and deployment tool written in Ruby, there is nothing better to sync GitHub commits to live servers whilst operating server side tasks at the same time.

TicketGun is continually being developed and improved for ease and simplicity, I have recently add PDF ticket attachments to ticket purchase emails, and we are currently developing a referral system like no other. Existing features include having the ability to choose for your customers to pay the booking fees and selling tickets to FREE events.

Posted On: Tuesday, July 8th, 2014 @ 1:13 pm by Ian Tearle


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