Website and ticket store of the Tonhalle - the planetarium of music on the banks of the Rhine in Düsseldorf

The former planetarium on the banks of the Rhine in Düsseldorf is home to one of the most beautiful concert halls in Germany: the Tonhalle. More than 300,000 spectators a year attend over 450 concerts by the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra and many other renowned artists.

Naturally, the digital presence and ticket booking system must also meet this high standard. A comprehensive relaunch project was therefore launched in 2021 with Bitmade as the technical partner and Grand Quest as the creative agency, which was successfully launched at the beginning of 2022.

The website for the Tonhalle was not only brought up to date technically, but also visually adapted to the new corporate design. External systems (ticket system for ticket sales, event management system) were connected to provide visitors with a consistent and pleasant buyer journey.

In addition to the extensive press and PR area, the website impresses visitors with a powerful search function and editors with automatic image resizing and cropping using Cloudinary Facedetection.

The following project goals had to be achieved:
- High demands on the performance of the overall system.
- Modern, fast user interface.
- Convenient and intuitive backend.
- Flexible options for content creation by the in-house team.
- Modern CMS.
- Connection to the new SaaS ticketing platform Secutix.
- Integration of the existing event database.

Bitmade has implemented and achieved these goals as follows:
- Drupal serves as the basis for the decoupled/headless CMS, the frontend was implemented with Next.js.
- Data to be displayed is delivered from Drupal to the frontend via JSON:API with the help of Next Drupal packages (https://next-drupal.org/).
- React and Tailwind CSS are used as frontend frameworks.
- The system is hosted and operated in the AWS Cloud.
- Automatic image resizing and cropping was implemented for editor-friendly work: all required image derivatives are generated with AI support via Cloudinary Face Detection and delivered via a CDN.
- An automatic, time-based import of events with the Migrate API Framework was set up.
- The Drupal backend features the Gin theme and offers nodes/paragraphs as building blocks for website content.
- A modern and fast search was integrated with Elastic/OpenSearch, the extensively used event sliders display suitable events using the Search API.
- Smart real-time segmentation of events allows editors to create new topic areas (carousels/sliders) in Drupal flexibly and easily as paragraphs and to group the numerous events according to customer presentation.

Visually, visitors can expect a modern website that pays tribute to classical music. Invisible to the user is the extensive tech stack that makes this possible: a modern headless Drupal that connects and integrates third-party systems via various interfaces. AI-supported image generation, which supports the editors in their daily work. Modern search services and real-time segmentation of events that filter the desired content. A React-based front end that offers visitors a pleasant user experience. All of this adds up to a system that meets the latest standards and can accompany the Tonhalle for many years to come.

For more information please visit www.bitmade.de