Molodyy Theatre — Box-office bot · theatre

Automated box office in Messenger and Telegram: browse the playbill, search by title or actor, pick a date and order a seat.

Role: Developer (solo): architecture, bot and website integration

Client: Kyiv Academic Molodyy Theatre

Team: Solo

Period: 2019–2020

The Molodyy Theatre, one of Kyiv’s academic theatres, wanted to sell tickets where its audience already chats: Facebook Messenger and Telegram. The repertoire changes often, so a bot with a hand-maintained copy of the playbill would quickly go stale. The theatre needed an automated box office that reads the same data as its website, helps people find a show by date, title or actor and leads straight to seat selection.

I built the bot on Viper, my own PHP MVC framework, with one codebase for Messenger and Telegram. It reads the repertoire live from the theatre’s Drupal website database: titles, dates, cast, galleries and trailers. Free-text search covers titles, actors and authors; dates come from a Messenger web-view calendar or a typed value such as 31.01. Shows appear as paged poster carousels with description, cast, gallery and YouTube trailer. Seat selection runs in the ticketing widget, and when nothing matches, the bot suggests the nearest show.

Playbill as paged poster carousels with dates and directors

Free-text search by title, actor or author

Date filter via a web-view calendar or a typed date like 31.01

Show details: description, cast, gallery and YouTube trailer

Seat selection in the ticketing widget, e-ticket sent by email

Deployed on the theatre’s own subdomain and fed live from its website database

PHP (Viper MVC), Messenger Platform, Telegram Bot API, MySQL, Drupal database, Messenger web views