It’s all about the base… and the PHP community
If you know us a bit it shouldn’t come as a surprise. We love the community, organizing and visiting events, socializing, and generally having fun with people sharing similar interests or at least a sense of humor. ;)
That being said, the very moment we started our own business we knew we’d like to finally be more involved in the event area. We immediately decided to bring back the series of local PHPers meetups in Lodz. We organised 4 editions since that time. The next one is coming at the end of October!
What’s more, we got closer to PHPers Summit organizers which resulted in co-organizing the last two editions of their conference. At first, my partner and co-founder Łukasz built the first-ever international agenda thanks to his wide network of top-level European speakers, and I helped a bit with writing copy for social media and finding sponsors.
This year though we have gone even further and became the Official Technology Partner and Chill Zone Sponsor of the conference. The latter meant we’ve arranged the whole leisure area with our RC car racing set, the Play Station, and a large-scale chess board. We also took care of special entertainment for football fans at the end of the day - you can find out more in my summary here.
More importantly, though, the first title came from the fact that we had built the new event website from scratch. Through 7 organized conferences, Sebastian and Konrad used 3 different systems - a simple Polish conference SaaS Evenea, an early Sylius-based store, and last year - a Shopware-based website.
They were not 100% happy with either of them, so they decided to give it one last shot… and came back to Sylius but with its updated version, new team, and a fresh approach.
The new event ticketing system
The application consists of 3 main modules:
I. Call for Papers
Even though there are popular apps specifically designed to manage speakers’ profiles and their talks like Sessionize, they all ship extra subscription costs. PHPers Summit organizers preferred to spend their funds once and for good and ordered us to build an extensive Call for Papers form and review UI, including speaker’s data, abstract, suggested talk duration, type, and other preferences.
II. Page Builder
For a conference website to be attractive and provide all necessary information, content management is inevitable. Unluckily, Sylius doesn’t ship with a default CMS. There are several community extensions to fulfill this niche though. After thorough analysis, we decided to bet on Monsieur Biz’s Rich Editor and CMS plugins, providing intuitive UI elements to choose from when arranging your page.
What is more, we have designed the whole agenda configuration and edition functionality. It allows the user to define the information about the presentation’s time, title, abstract, speaker, track, and room.
III. Event Tickets Management
Finally, we’ve built the most significant part of every event website - the ticket management system. To achieve this, we’ve simply extended the basic Sylius functionalities.
Tickets as Sylius products
That being said, tickets are configurable products in Sylius. So, they contain media, descriptions (short, long, and for SEO) in two languages (Polish and English), attributes (event name in this case), and variants.
Variants are crucial because they reflect the ticket types. If you have ever followed any conference or festival, you must be familiar with typical sales stages like “early bird”, “regular”, and “late bird”. PHPers Summit 2024 was no different. The limits are set thanks to the default inventory tracking definable in Sylius, and so are the availability dates.
Each ticket variant may have a different price (and currency!) per sales channel. It turned out to be valuable since the conference became international last year, so we’ve got to set amounts both in PLN and EUR.
Cart with ticket owners and more!
After adding a specific ticket to the cart, you can select its quantity and provide ticket owners (yes, multiple) data like name, company, email marketing (we’ve integrated Email Labs), and diet preference (vege is the only option so far but we can easily add other). Also, once you provide your VAT number, the order summary eliminates the tax.
In standard event ticketing software, there’s usually no option to buy various tickets in one checkout, not to mention other products like merch. Thanks to our system, PHPers Summit owners could easily sell tickets to the conference, workshops, and merch, all at once.
Managing sold tickets
New tickets are created in a separate back office tab in Sylius once the payment is made. They are also linked in the order view. You can browse, and edit old sold tickets., incl. changing the owner name and preference (mailing and diet).
You can export, import or bulk send all selected tickets as PDFs with QR codes. They are not delivered automatically when the client completes the order (this logic can be easily changed). Every ticket can be confirmed manually or scanned… Yes, scanned! It’s battle-tested on ~900 attendees of the conference registered via this scanner enabled on mobile browser!
Pay with TPay
Tpay is a payment service provider from Poland growing every day thanks to its flexible offering, quality API, and… PHP codebase. ;) The latter made it easy for us to deliver custom integration, including all popular payment methods like Blik (the leading Polish mobile payment solution), cards, wallets, and support for foreign currency - EUR. After the successful project launch, we were rewarded with the opportunity to deliver a full-fledged Tpay plugin for Sylius. We can’t wait to publish a separate case study about it!
When it comes to the delivery time of new functionalities with Sylius and Symfony, Commerce Weavers are second to none. It's our third system provider for PHPers Summit and by far the best. We don't need to look any further. We’ve finally found a reliable long-term partner. Their commitment to the PHP community and the high standard of service and quality of the developed application speaks for itself.
Konrad Siamro, PHPers Summit Organizer
The process
Thanks to the long-term relationship with the project’s stakeholders, and co-organization of the 2023 conference edition, features scoping was a breeze. We briefly agreed upon the desired functionalities and a fixed price, which is not a very common strategy in our industry.
Why did we go for it? First of all, it’s desired by customers who work on tight budgets. These companies cannot afford prolonged delivery periods and unexpected invoices. They need to make sure that specific work is done on time.
Secondly, we own an unfair advantage as the agency hiring Sylius Core Team members with its leaders involved for 10 years in this technology development. This means we know the product in and out and allows us to make probably the most accurate estimations on the market.
Once the deal was done, the project setup happened very fast. We’ve used our favourite Git software GitHub to start a code repository and backlog with various priorities divided into tasks on a Kanban board. The whole communication process was channeled through Slack Connect.
Łukasz supervised the project but the main developer was Kevin, our first employee with 5 years of Sylius experience. Our long-time collaborator Szymon designed the app's look & feel and developed its frontend in Twig. Jan, Jakub, and Mateusz also contributed here and there. Sebastian, the PHPers Summit organizer took care of the project’s hosting on Digital Ocean. All in all, it was a truly holistic team effort!
It was a great pleasure to work on the PHPers Summit project. As always at Commerce Weavers, we took care of the code quality. However, I didn’t even know that the stack we built would later be the base of our first software product! Stay tuned!
Kevin Kaniaburka, Sylius Engineer at Commerce Weavers
What’s next?
Of course, we are already planning the next edition of the Summit and hope to see you next year. The event page is already available on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Crossweb.
What is more, I can tease you with the very first information about a brand new conference that will happen in the same venue just one day earlier… and we will do our best to make it join the list of most appreciated industry events in Poland and (hopefully) beyond. #commercedev.
Safe the date: 23-24.05.2025 because the quality time is guaranteed!
E.T.E. aka ELLIOT
There are probably hundreds of apps for ticket sales and conference management. Many agencies before and after us also have this amazing idea to build a product for this industry because one of their customers simply needed to sell tickets to some event.
So is there any point for us to do the same? Well, I believe there is, if only we approach it the right way and focus on a certain niche. But first, every new endeavour needs to have an exciting name, right?
Around a year ago when we brainstormed about our possible future products, I came up with the name Elliot. Where does it come from? What does it solve? Why do we want to do the same as everyone? Well, we will reveal this and more very soon!
If you're interested in selling tickets with our system, contact us at hello@commerceweavers.com. ;)