#13 Allow the stage to be printed at the top of the seatmap

[Dan]

Provide an option for the stage to be displayed at the top of the seatmap if desired. This could be done with a boolean stored in the theatres table for example, similar to staggered_seating.

[Maxime Gamboni]

If you have time I'm totally open to you implementing this :) (I don't expect to have much time for FreeSeat in the next couple months apart from emergency bug fixes)

I'd even advocate this and staggered_seating to be moved to a new "zone" tables. (That will maybe grow further as I hinted in the "Better handling/display of zones in seats.php" feature request). That table should have a theatre id and zone name as primary key (or an auto_increment key and reference to those two). This permits representing a theatre having a stage in the middle or a U-shaped theatre, in which each zone may have the stage in a different side.

Also, rather than a boolean, use numbers 1, 2, 3, ... and constants in a php file, so that we may at some point support stages on the left and right as well.

As for the default, I did a google image for "theatre map" and it's almost 50/50 of top versus bottom (As I scrolled down I counted about 15 tops and 15 bottoms, and a couple lefts, and gave up) so I'd say keep the default to bottom (to avoid the behaviour changing when people upgrade).

[Dan]

Ok I will give it a try. Our theatre has a single zone so I am not very familiar with the zones implementation. I will propose something rather simple and then if you want to expand it that is up to you.

So you envision these changes going into core freeseat rather than a plugin?

[Dan]

Also I note that this choice will affect a few plugins like bookingmap and disabledseats. So there will have to be some generalized method of displaying the stage in the correct location which is respected by any plugin displaying a seatmap.

[Maxime Gamboni]

Thanks.

A generalized method is already in place — seatmap rendering is done by functions/seatmap.php which is called by seats.php and all the plugins you mention. That function is called once per zone in the case of multizone theatre (and each zone displays the stage so we know which direction people will be looking, BUT we could consider a value NONE for stage location in addition to top and bottom for people who want a zone without the "stage" box displayed).

And yes this should be done in core freeseat: I think it's nice that people can transfer seatmaps (including stage location) from one freeseat installation to another without having to worry about which plugins are installed, so different groups performing in the same theatre could re-use the seat map designing work.