Rob Lake Ticket Calendar
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, FullCalendar
YEAR
2025
EXTERNAL URL
Custom WordPress ticket calendar built as a standalone embeddable platform for Rob Lake — the Merlin Award-winning illusionist touring internationally across 60+ countries. A dedicated calendar subdomain designed to integrate seamlessly into an inherited Wix site, routing audiences from show discovery to ticket purchase across dozens of venues and ticketing providers.
Development lead on this project at Situation Interactive.
Background
A world-touring illusionist needed a ticket calendar that could work within — not replace — an existing website.
Rob Lake — named “The World’s Greatest Illusionist” by NBC, the youngest recipient of the Merlin Award for International Stage Magician of the Year, and an America’s Got Talent quarter-finalist — performs to sold-out audiences across more than 60 countries. His 2025 touring schedule included international runs in Dubai and Mumbai, a Broadway engagement at the Broadhurst Theatre with The Muppets, and a national tour of performing arts centers across the United States. The primary website at roblake.com was built on Wix, and the team managing it had no interest in migrating away from it. But Wix had no native solution for the kind of ticket calendar the production needed — a dynamic, venue-aware system that could display dozens of tour dates across multiple regions and route each one to the correct ticketing provider. The constraint was clear: build a ticket calendar that could be embedded into the existing Wix site without requiring a platform migration or disrupting the workflows already in place.
The calendar needed to support a touring schedule that spans performing arts centers, casinos, international venues, and Broadway — each with its own ticketing partner and purchase flow.
Implementation
A standalone WordPress calendar on its own subdomain, designed to embed seamlessly into a Wix parent site.
I built the ticket calendar as a standalone WordPress application deployed to its own subdomain — calendar.roblake.com — purpose-built for embedding into the existing Wix site via iframe. The WordPress backend powers a custom event management system where each tour date is a structured content object with venue name, city, date, time, ticketing provider URL, and availability status. The frontend renders these dates through FullCalendar, presenting multiple view modes — month, week, list, and a touch-friendly scroll view powered by Mobiscroll for mobile audiences. Each calendar entry links directly to the appropriate ticketing provider for that venue, whether that’s Ticketmaster for a performing arts center, a casino box office, or an international presenter’s own ticketing platform. The design system was built to visually integrate with the Wix parent site — matching Rob Lake’s brand palette, typography, and spacing so the embedded calendar reads as a native section of the page rather than a foreign widget. A custom REST API layer supports dynamic data retrieval with prefetch optimization, keeping the calendar responsive even as the tour schedule scales across dozens of dates and venues.
The WordPress admin gives the production team full control over the tour calendar — adding dates, updating venue links, marking shows as sold out, and managing regional groupings — all without touching the Wix site or involving a developer.
Results
A production-ready ticket calendar powering tour dates from Broadway to Bollywood.
The ticket calendar launched ahead of Rob Lake’s 2025 touring season and immediately became the primary conversion path for ticket sales across the production’s entire schedule. The subdomain architecture solved the core constraint — the Wix site remained untouched while gaining a fully dynamic, WordPress-powered calendar that the team manages independently. The calendar has supported dates across the full range of Rob Lake’s touring footprint: international engagements at the Dubai World Trade Centre and Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, the Broadway run at the Broadhurst Theatre, and a growing national tour of U.S. performing arts centers. Each venue routes to its own ticketing provider seamlessly, with the calendar handling the complexity of multiple regions, date formats, and purchase flows behind a single consistent interface.
The platform continues to serve the production as Rob Lake’s “Live From Broadway” national tour expands — a lightweight, embeddable system that scaled from concept to production without requiring a single change to the client’s existing website.
