From Afishka to Aticket: Building a multilingual, multi-region ticket network on WordPress

Mikael mesheryakov (Иное-Тв) — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:42:38 +0000

What started as Afishka, a Russian-language guide to events in Israel, evolved into Aticket—a multilingual, multi-region network with localized portals, real-time event data, and affiliate commerce. Under the hood it’s mostly WordPress (yes, really), The Events Calendar, WooCommerce, a handful of custom plugins, and automation glue (Make.com + AI) to keep content fresh and monetization tidy.

The origin story

Afishka began as a simple way to surface Russian-language events in Israel.
Traffic grew → artists kept touring → partners started asking for other regions → we needed language, currency, and local checkout.
Rather than “one mega site,” we went federated: country portals, local language where useful, consistent UX everywhere.

Network map (current snapshot)

Global hubs

aticket.net — worldwide
aticket.eu — Europe overview

Country/region portals (sample)

UK: aticket.uk
Germany: atickets.de
France: fr.aticket.net
Spain: es.aticket.eu
Italy: it.aticket.net
Netherlands: nl.aticket.eu
Belgium: be.aticket.eu
Switzerland: ch.aticket.eu
Austria: at.aticket.eu
Nordics: no.aticket.eu, se.aticket.eu, fi.aticket.eu, dk.aticket.net
CEE: cz.afishka.top, pl.afishka.top
Israel: aticket.co.il
South Africa: za.aticket.net
New Zealand: nz.aticket.net
UAE: tickets.almaszone.com

Each portal highlights concerts, theatre, comedy, sports, and festivals, with direct links to trusted sellers.

Why WordPress (still)

Speed to iterate: custom post types, hooks, and an ecosystem of battle-tested plugins.
The Events Calendar for editorial control + structured event data.
WooCommerce for checkout flows when needed (e.g., local registrations).
Elementor for rapid landing pages that marketing can ship without dev time.
Multilingual & Multicurrency for localized prices and language toggles.

This stack let us stay close to the business while shipping fast.

The data layer (APIs, scraping, and “widgetizing”)

Ticketmaster Discovery API powers live event data. We wrap it with small “widgets” (shortcodes/blocks) that:
- fetch events by country/venue/promoter,
- normalize fields (dates, images, seating notes),
- and render SEO-friendly cards with canonical links.
Custom WordPress scraping plugin (our own) for sources that don’t expose APIs. Requirements we implemented:
1. Multiple selectors per scraper
2. Transform scraped data via ChatGPT (titles/descriptions normalization, locale hints)
3. Create posts directly (no raw store), with a unique field to prevent duplicates
4. Manual run and scheduled jobs

We never store keys in code, and we rate-limit + cache API responses server-side.

Automation (Make.com + AI)

Google Trends → content ideas (spike detection per region/language)
AI rewrites/summaries for long bios and event descriptions
Telegram publishing: when an event is updated in The Events Calendar, we auto-post to our Telegram channel with emoji, price, start date, canonical link, and a small CTA.
Affiliate sync: normalize UTM & sub-IDs, attach to links per region.

i18n & multi-region: what actually mattered

RTL/LTR coexistence (Hebrew ↔︎ everything else).
Currency switching per region and even per link (for A/B):

// Example: set currency via URL param like ?wcmlc=EUR
add_action('wcml_client_currency', function ($current) {
    return isset($_GET['wcmlc']) ? strtoupper(esc_attr($_GET['wcmlc'])) : $current;
});

Slug strategy: keep short, language-native slugs for SEO (city + artist), avoid transliteration soup.
Schema: Event and Organization structured data per locale; image sizes consistent.

Performance & reliability

We host on multiple providers to keep portals physically close to users.
Page caching (e.g., WP Super Cache) + careful JS/CSS minification; exclude fragile scripts (like some Events Calendar widgets) from aggressive optimization when needed.
Image sources: prefer provider images (when licensed) and lazy-load everything else.
Avoid over-optimizing the admin: editors must be fast, or content dies.

Commerce & payments (when we sell directly)

WooCommerce products for specific registrations (e.g., local events with fixed price).
Stock = seats; quantity limited (e.g., max 3), with dynamic attendee fields.
Thank-you page and flows adapt to product category (“event” vs “merch”).
Cardcom gateway in Israel (with category-based operation codes).
Single-product per cart for event SKUs to avoid multi-date mix-ups.

Affiliates & attribution

We run an in-house affiliate layer for partner landing pages:

30-day cookie window (overrideable)
Simple DB table for leads with timestamps and affiliate IDs
“Paid to affiliate” status tracking
Manual override trigger for special cases (e.g., sponsor campaigns)

This plays nicely with external affiliate programs (Ticketmaster, Amazon, travel).

Editorial workflow

Long-form SEO: artist bios, city guides, seasonal festival pages.
Event tables: chronological order (always), price snippets, city filters.
Cross-posting to Telegram; planned YouTube Shorts and email “What’s on” digests.
Internal links across the network (country page ↔ city page ↔ artist page).
Add a subtle footer CTA:
“Узнай первым о лучших концертах в Израиле: Телеграм канале — https://t.me/concerts_il”

A tiny architecture sketch

flowchart LR
  subgraph Input
    TM[Ticketmaster API]
    Scrapers[Custom Scrapers]
    Trends[Google Trends]
  end

  subgraph WP[WordPress Network]
    TEC[The Events Calendar]
    WC[WooCommerce]
    MU[Multilingual & Multicurrency]
    Widgets[Shortcodes/Widgets]
    AI[ChatGPT transforms]
  end

  subgraph Automation
    Make[Make.com Scenarios]
    TG[Telegram Bot]
  end

  Input --> WP
  WP --> Automation
  Make --> TG
  WP --> Users[Portals by Region/Language]

A few code crumbs

1) “Featured events” RSS with future-date filter

add_action('init', function () {
  add_feed('featured-events', function () {
    header('Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
    $cutoff = (new DateTime(current_time('Y-m-d H:i:s')))->modify('+9 days')->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

    $q = new WP_Query([
      'post_type' => 'tribe_events',
      'posts_per_rss' => 10,
      'tax_query' => [[
        'taxonomy' => 'post_tag',
        'field' => 'slug',
        'terms' => 'featured',
      ]],
      'meta_query' => [[
        'key' => '_EventStartDate',
        'value' => $cutoff,
        'compare' => '>=',
        'type' => 'DATETIME',
      ]]
    ]);

    echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<rss version=\"2.0\">\n<channel>\n";
    echo "<title>Featured Events</title>\n<link>" . esc_url(home_url('/')) . "</link>\n";

    while ($q->have_posts()) {
      $q->the_post();
      $img = get_the_post_thumbnail_url(get_the_ID(), 'large');
      echo "<item>\n<title>" . esc_html(get_the_title()) . "</title>\n";
      echo "<link>" . esc_url(get_permalink()) . "</link>\n";
      if ($img) echo "<enclosure url=\"" . esc_url($img) . "\" type=\"image/jpeg\" />\n";
      echo "<description><![CDATA[" . wp_kses_post(get_the_excerpt()) . "]]></description>\n";
      echo "</item>\n";
    }

    echo "</channel>\n</rss>";
    wp_reset_postdata();
  });
});

2) Category-aware checkout behavior (sketch)

add_filter('woocommerce_add_to_cart_validation', function ($valid, $pid, $qty) {
  // Enforce single event product in cart
  if ($valid && has_term([46], 'product_cat', $pid)) {
    foreach (WC()->cart->get_cart() as $c) {
      if ($c['product_id'] !== $pid && has_term([46], 'product_cat', $c['product_id'])) {
        wc_add_notice(__('You can only choose one event date per order.'), 'error');
        return false;
      }
    }
  }
  return $valid;
}, 10, 3);

What worked (and what didn’t)

Wins

Country portals rank faster than a single global site for event queries.
Editors can ship fast (Elementor + good component library).
Telegram boosts discovery for Russian-speaking audiences.
API-first mindset keeps content fresh without burning writers out.

Traps

Over-aggressive asset optimization can break event widgets—exclude selectively.
Don’t over-centralize slugs: let languages breathe.
Affiliate attribution disputes happen: keep logs and add a manual override.

What’s next

Better city/venue knowledge graph (dedupe + cross-locale linking).
Auto-generate artist landing pages from first-party + API data.
Expand short-video workflow (YouTube Shorts/TikTok with safe affiliate framing).
A tiny public SDK for our “event widgets” so partners can embed them.

Closing thoughts

You don’t need a greenfield stack to build a global product. We got pretty far with WordPress, a pragmatic plugin set, a few hundred lines of glue code, and consistent editorial + automation habits. If you’re balancing speed, SEO, and monetization, a federated WordPress network is still a wildly productive place to start.

Where to explore (short list)

🌐 Global hub - aticket.net
🇪🇺 Europe hub - aticket.eu
🇬🇧 United Kingdom - aticket.uk
🇩🇪 Germany - atickets.de
🇮🇱 Israel - afishka.co.il
🧭 Turkey - tr.aticket.eu
🌍 Afishka (RU hub) - afishka.net

Happy to answer questions about specific pieces (TEC quirks, Woo flows, Telegram publishing, etc.).

FeedWind embedding test

Mikael mesheryakov (Иное-Тв) — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:13:06 +0000

Check out this Pen I made for FeedWind embedding test!

DEV Community: Mikael mesheryakov (Иное-Тв)