tickethaghiasophia.com

This project was developed for an Istanbul-based professional tourist guide with 29 years of experience, who wanted to transition from manual, cash-based ticket sales to a fully digital system.

The platform enables tourists to purchase tickets online for major landmarks including Hagia Sophia, Topkapı Palace, Dolmabahçe Palace, Basilica Cistern, Chora Church, as well as bundled combo tickets. In addition to ticket sales, the website was designed to present the guide’s background and build trust with potential customers through a clear and professional online presence.

The project came as a referral after a previous successful client collaboration, and introduced a new level of complexity compared to earlier work. One of the key requirements was building a complete system that handles ticket sales, payments, and event management reliably.

I worked as a Full-Stack Developer together with Ata Tan Dağıdır, and we took ownership of the entire system, including frontend, backend setup, and payment infrastructure. We also collaborated with an external designer for the first time, who handled the full UI/UX design process, while we focused on implementation.

Instead of building everything from scratch, we researched existing solutions and decided to use Pretix, a Germany-based open-source ticket management system. We self-hosted Pretix and configured it as the backend, managing events, ticket types, and validation flows.

One of the biggest challenges was payment integration. Since global providers like PayPal and Stripe are not available in Türkiye, none of Pretix’s default payment options were usable for our case.

To solve this, we developed a custom iyzico payment provider plugin for Pretix. We worked directly with the Pretix team to understand the plugin system, implemented the integration, and deployed it in production for this project. We also handled the full iyzico application and approval process on behalf of the client.

After successfully using the integration in a real production environment, we decided to open-source the plugin and publish it on the Pretix Marketplace, contributing back to the ecosystem and making it available for other developers facing similar regional limitations.

The final platform is actively used to sell tickets online, replacing manual processes and enabling a scalable and reliable sales system for the client.

👉 Live Site: tickethaghiasophia.com

👉 LinkedIn Post (full story)

👉 Open Source Plugin (Pretix Marketplace)

👉 GitHub

👉 PyPI