Improved place handling

It has been a long time since I have posted anything here! Behind the scenes I have been maintaining the code that runs the site, upgrading Python, Django, the server’s operating system, … , and dealing with any support issues that arise. However, I have just managed to add a couple of new features that will help provide better information for theatres and other places.

The first is that you can now link a place to a “parent” place. This means for venues with multiple stages, you can associate productions with those stages, which themselves will be linked as “part of” their parent venue. For example, The Door, the smaller auditorium at the Birmingham Rep, has its own listing, as one part of the Birmingham Rep. You can still attach productions to the parent venue, if you don’t have that extra information to provide.

The second thing is that places now have support for other names, along with dates. This means the Noël Coward Theatre now has an “Also called” section (Albery Theatre 1973 – 2006, New Theatre 1903 – 1973) which means its entire production history can be held in one place (previous separate entries for those theatres have been merged together). When viewing a production, the relevant name should be used depending upon the dates of the production, and the other names should appear as part of auto-complete and search.