Hey Tessiturians!
On one of my many back burners, i've been toying with the idea of migrating our website Drupal. Frankly, i don't like working within a CMS, but there can be benefits, and it seems like Drupal is a (the) good way to go.
There is little talk that i can find about integrating Tessitura's WebAPI with Drupal, BUT it seems like it could also be a super valuable project, not just to any 1 organization, but to the network as a whole.
Is anyone interested in joining in on this venture? Call it a Network OpenSource Drupal integration?
if it existed, would you consider using it?
Is anyone so interested, they want to help get the ball rolling?
Thanks?James
That makes sense, and I would hope that is the case. All conversations I’ve had within the tessitura community point towards “The Network” and sharing being a part of that…perhaps my inquiry to SMM will be well received.
FAIRFIELD THEATRE COMPANY | on StageOne | at The KleinJAMES BONCEK | Technical Director70 Sanford Street, Fairfield, CT 06824 |T 203.319.1404 x310 | F 203.259.1747 | C 317.426.6235
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Hi all -
Sorry I'm chiming in to this so late today. Of course the one day I'm not on top of my Tessitura Forum emails, everyone is talking about my baby, www.smm.org!
If I could chant Drupal Drupal Drupal from the rooftops and tell everyone to use it, I would! It's really becoming mainstream. whitehouse.gov has been on Drupal for a couple years now, and many other US governent agencies have recently moved to Drupal. It's awesome to see an open source platform used in such big ways.
As an organization, the Science Museum of Minnesota has been using Drupal since its very early days. Specifically with our project-specific sites, including the award-winning Science Buzz website - www.sciencebuzz.org
I launched www.smm.org on Drupal back in spring 2007. I was a little rocky with it at first (and it has since come a long way), but now Drupal is in my blood and I will never look back. Shortly after, we chose Tessitura for our organization. Here's an overview of what we've done online with Tessitura and Drupal:
Online Ticketing System - Launched: April 2008https://www.smm.org/tickets/buyWe went live with Tessitura in January 2008 and had hoped to be live online at that same time; that didn't happen, but we have now been online with ticketing for about 2.5 years. We had originally hoped to have online ticketing more fully integrated with Drupal, but we were under a time crunch and pretty much all of the "Tessitura Approved Web Developers" code in .Net/ASP and Drupal is all PHP. As newbies to Tessitura ourselves, we wanted to work with someone who was experienced with the Tessitura API rather than a Drupal developer. Therefore we selected Commercial Media to write our online ticketing system for us; they were willing to code it in PHP. While our ticketing system is technically part of our Drupal site, the code is all in a static place on our web server and the Drupal pages simply use PHP includes to pull in the ticketing code.
Online Class & Camp Registration System - Launched: January 2009https://www.smm.org/classes/catalogWe had a bit more lead time with this project, and we had a bit of a rocky experience with the ticketing implementation, so we looked for a new development firm. We felt strongly that we wanted this Class Registration system to be integrated more tightly with our Drupal site. We chose Gorton Studios - a local Drupal development shop - to help us with this. Their team is highly active in the Drupal community, and their lead developer has written some of the most popular contributed modules in Drupal. With the guidance from our senior web developer (no longer with us) and our database admins, they were able to quickly learn the Tessitura API and we're extremely happy with the end result. Gorton Studios also does web design and development for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (another Tessitura licensee with a Drupal site), although I think they did the same thing we did and chose Commercial Media for their online ticketing.
Current / Future Projects:- We're in the final stages of implementing WordFly (we're not using a Tessitura-integrated email system currently), and we're just finishing up development of new Drupal modules to handle enewsletter subscriptions and basic Tessitura account management.- We're about to begin a huge project with Gorton Studios to completely overhaul our online ticketing, membership, and donation systems - all fully integrated in Drupal with custom modules. And - fingers crossed - we hope to do this in Tessitura Next Generation!
THE IMPORTANT STUFF:
- We're starting to get more and more questions about sharing of the code. To be honest, I need to due some research and work with our internal museum team, our partners at Gorton Studios, and the Tessitura Network before I can give more detail about the sharing of code. We're all for the open source part of Drupal, but I want to make sure all 3 parties are in agreement before I proceed. It is true, as the drupal.org post says, that we did get some pushback originally about sharing all this code. But it's been a while since it's been discussed.- In the meantime, as you can tell, I'm very proud of the work we've done integrating Tessitura with Drupal, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about our successes. My direct contact info is below.
Thanks for reading!Eric
Eric MuellerWebmaster & Social Media GuyScience Museum of MinnesotaEmail: emueller@smm.orgPhone: (651) 221-9455
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Oh, and one last thing. Just found out a few hours ago that I'm going to the Tessitura Conference this year. Woohoo!
Which means I'll also be presenting on Drupal and the successes we've had with Drupal + Tessitura.
See you in Orlando!