A new website and ticket shop for Zürich's most iconic cinemas.
Concept, project lead and engineering for a new Arthouse website and online ticket shop, replacing an ageing WordPress site. The design was outsourced to Unstated International, and the ticketing integration was built against an API that had no usable documentation.
Context
Who they are.
Since 1977, Arthouse has brought quality cinema, international gems and award-winning productions to Zürich's most iconic screens. Today that means three locations and five screening rooms in the city. Their website and ticket shop were the front door to all of it, and both were running on a WordPress build that had reached the end of its life.
The problem
What they walked in with.
The site had to be rebuilt without losing the character of the brand, and the ticket shop had to talk to an external ticketing provider whose API returned XML and whose documentation was missing most of what we needed. On top of that, the old checkout made people register or log in before they could even see the layout of the room they were booking into.
Our approach
How we worked.
Owned the concept, ran the project
Wrote the concept for both the new website and the online ticket shop, then ran the project end to end: scope, schedule, and the people. Design was briefed out to Unstated International and managed through to delivery.
Wrote the documentation the vendor didn't have
The external ticketing API returned XML and shipped with documentation that left out most of what mattered. We reverse-engineered the endpoints, wrote our own reference for them, and built converters against it, turning the integration from a guessing game into something the team could work from.
Made it load fast
Every showtime, seat and price comes from a third-party system. A caching strategy sits between that system and the site, so pages render immediately instead of waiting on someone else's API.
Handed them the keys
Statamic went in as the CMS, integrated with the film data coming from the ticketing provider. Programme pages populate themselves; everything else the Arthouse team edits on their own, without calling us.
Highlights
The interesting parts.
- The seat map is visible before you sign up. The old checkout forced a login or registration before you could see the room at all.
- Pages load fast despite every showtime, seat and price arriving from a slow external XML API.
- Statamic wired into the ticketing provider's film data, so the programme keeps itself current and the team edits the rest independently.
Stack
What we built it on.
Timeline
How it unfolded.
Concept
Scope for the new site and ticket shop, and the design brief handed to Unstated International.
Integration
Reverse-engineer the external ticketing API, write our own documentation for it, build the XML converters.
Build & launch
Laravel and Livewire build, Statamic CMS, caching layer, and launch off the old WordPress site.
Ongoing
Support, maintenance and new development as the cinemas and their programme evolve.
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