As long as a room is only a number, you can say "full". You cannot say "row C, seat 14". The seating plan changes that: you draw the room once, and every event held there can seat its attendees.
Note: an event with free seating does not change by a single pixel. The plan is a choice, not a requirement.
Drawing the room
The plan belongs to the room, not to the event: a room does not change shape from one concert to the next. So you draw it from the Rooms module.
- Open Rooms, then the room concerned.
- Click Seating plan.
- First set where the stage is. That is what tells you where row A is; without it, a plan cannot be read.
- Click Add a zone.
Zones
A room is described in blocks: the stalls, the balcony, a family block. Each zone has a kind.
| Kind | What it means |
|---|---|
| Numbered seats | Everyone picks their chair. The zone has rows and seats per row. |
| Standing | A capacity, without numbers. A pit, a forecourt, the back of the hall. |
| Accessible | Seats reserved for people with reduced mobility and their companion. |
For a numbered-seat zone, you place no chair by hand: you write 12 rows of 24, and the 288 seats are generated with their coordinates. The counter updates as you type.
Rows are named A, B, C, and seats numbered 1 to N. Row A is on the stage side, as in any hall.
Note: a zone cannot exceed 5,000 seats. Beyond that, split the room into several zones, which a room that size does anyway.
Placing and resizing
The position and size sliders move the zone on the plan. Moving a zone does not recreate its seats: their identifiers are the ones carried by tickets already sold, and recreating them would move everybody in the room.
Changing the number of rows, on the other hand, regenerates the grid. Do that before opening registrations.
Blocking a seat
A pillar, the sound desk, a broken chair: a seat can be marked out of service. It stays visible on the plan, dashed, and cannot be chosen.
Turning seating on for an event
Once the room is drawn, open your event and turn on seat the attendees. The event must be held in that room.
From then on:
- The public page shows the plan above the form.
- An attendee picks their seat, up to ten per registration.
- Their ticket, their email and their badge carry the seat number.
- The door list and the check-in screen show everyone's seat.
What the plan guarantees
Two people cannot buy the same chair. This is not a check made at the right moment, it is a database constraint: between reading "the seat is free" and writing, the other browser has had time. Here the database decides, and the second buyer gets a clear refusal instead of a silent duplicate.
A chosen seat is held during payment. Without that, somebody picks their seat, heads to payment, and loses it while typing their card number. The hold lasts ten minutes; if the payment does not go through, the seat returns to sale on its own.
A lost seat is named. If the chair you had selected has just been taken, the screen says "B4 has just been taken" and refreshes the plan. Not a technical message: the number you can see on the plan.
With sessions
If your event has sessions, the same chair is sold again for each session. Seat B4 of the first showing and seat B4 of the second are two different seats, and the plan shows the one for the chosen session.
What the plan does not do yet
- Curved rows: the grid is straight. An amphitheatre is described as several zones.
- Automatic group placement: seats are picked one by one.
- Importing an existing plan from a file.