I would add a note on this thinking that I think is important to this thread, that building a perfect system architecture -with high level of investment both financially and in sweat equity- may not have to be the target objective. Primarily because its unlikely to age well.

If you've experience running projects outside of an institution or sluggish organisation of any type, in a more agile environment you'll be aware that its now very easy to switch and adapt between systems fast, at least operationally (e.g base camp > trello > slack > colony.io?) - this combined with the goals of web3.0 (linked data, blockchain etc) is creating an intensification for all systems and platforms to bend towards interoperability (which will only be further compacted by future EU regulations on data portability https://www.bna.com/final-european-union-n57982067329/).

Therefore having a checklist which factors in a few key requirements of anything you adopt might be better than trying to build a perfect system, those things being;
- is it open source / if it is open source how large is the developer community

- does it have an API / what formats does it support

- does it strive towards data interoperability

- is there active support easy automation platforms such as IFFT or Zapier

Obviously the larger your organisation the more delimiting this strategy will be.

Just some quick thoughts. Finding this thread very insightful.
If there are any studies on this out there I would also love to see read them!

On 3 August 2017 at 15:24, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Thanks all, good thread - keep ‘em coming - will definitely check the examples there!

I’m not (you’ll be surprised to hear) particularly focused on WordPress per-se in this equation. Obviously it’d be the end point for us and any users given that it’s the tool we use for presenting web content, but it’s part of a bigger question which is everything you’ve all outlined below.

The “integration” that is offered by say something like K3 Retail - http://www.k3retail.com/en/industry/attractions-ticketing/ - is actually only superficial as far as I can tell.

When you look at an example from this page - like the Design Museum - the ticketing is done by digitickets (https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/california-designing-freedom), the shop is Shopify (https://designmuseumshop.com) - I’d imagine K3 is doing something to get user data into the system whatever purchase you do, but we’re *still* no closer to having a unified basket or a user experience which is anywhere near joined-up.

You get almost close when you look at tools like https://www.bookthatapp.com/ which says it’ll do tickets but within Shopify - but talking to the developer they say none of the event data is available via any kind of feed or API, which again means this sits there as a source of duplicate / silo’d data.

I think Ben’s point is an important one - figuring out which of these systems is a “core” one and then hanging other stuff off it is probably the only way to go. But it’s still altogether a bit unsatisfying, IMO.

Maybe...

1) ..it’s just too hard to build anything other than totally bespoke systems (which then automatically rules out smaller / poorer orgs)

2) ..users actually don’t care that much and are perfectly happy to bounce around from system to system. Maybe users don’t need a membership and some merchandise and a ticket all in one place and it’s just museum wishful thinking that they are going to buy all these things..

Is there any research in this space, either on systems, or on usability, or on conversion rates, or comparative analytics?

If not, why not? Seems odd given that many would argue that museums really need tools to help them market and sell more effectively...

cheers!

Mike

_____________

Mike Ellis

Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency

http://thirty8.co.uk

** NEW: http://wpformuseums.com for people using WordPress in museums **

** Workshops, courses and free downloads: http://trainingdigital.co.uk **

On 3 Aug 2017, 13:40 +0100, James Grimster <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:

The challenge we keep getting thrown when going down both the WordPress and SaaS route with things like Shopify is the integration with Local Authority payment gateways - how do you use
the commercial cloud offerings if the council is using Civica Icon / Capita ePay with SAP / Oracle e-business suites - without a load of one off bespoke work and testing ?

and on that note, if anyone has built a WooCommerce payment gateway plugin for Civica Icon Authority I’d be very interested in your experience …

cheers

James G

On 3 Aug 2017, at 13:10, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

We’re using WooComerce with Wordpress for the ticketing system on MuseumNext.com and it has some big pluses like knocking our fees from 6% down to 1.5%.

The big downside is that the last Wordpress update knocked out a load of functionality and cost us a day of our web agencies time to sort out.

If you’re thinking of building something to fill this gap in the market Mike, I think that’s the thing that you’d need to be very clear with customers about. It would need a solid maintenance contract to deal with WP updates.

Jim

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