No Way to Save a Plan
Visitors worked through hundreds of listings with nothing to hold their choices. Close the tab and the planning started over.
CASE STUDY
A Festival Planner for Hundreds of Sites Across New York
How 40Q rebuilt Open House New York’s visitor planner as a React and TypeScript application embedded in WordPress, adding an interactive map, saved itineraries and a lottery for capacity-limited venues.
A Planner Straining Under Its Own Catalog
Open House New York is an annual weekend festival that invites people of all ages and backgrounds to explore hundreds of historical and architectural sites across the city. For the 2022 edition, the planner behind it had to do considerably more.
Slow Filters
Filtering the full festival programme was sluggish enough to get in the way of browsing, which is the one thing the planner exists to do.
No Map to Plan a Route
The programme was a list. Visitors deciding what to see in an afternoon had no way to understand which sites sat near each other.
Capacity Limits at Popular Venues
Some of the most in-demand buildings could only admit a fixed number of people, with no mechanism to allocate those places fairly.
Business Impact
Thousands of visitors moved through the 2022 planner and many registered to keep their itineraries. Folding an external CMS into WordPress also collapsed two editorial workflows into one.
The Solution
40Q rebuilt the planner as a modern front-end application inside OHNY’s existing WordPress site, so visitors got app-grade behaviour while the editorial team kept the tools they already knew.
Visitor Planner
React and TypeScript in WordPress
A single-page application inside the editorial site
We built the planner in React with TypeScript, embedded in WordPress and talking to it over the API. A hybrid approach: app-like responsiveness on the front end, unchanged publishing behind it.
Accounts and Bookmarking
Itineraries that outlive the browser session
WordPress’s own registration lets visitors create an account, bookmark the sites they want and return to a saved, numbered itinerary instead of starting from scratch.
Faster Filtering
Hundreds of sites, filtered without the wait
We reworked how the programme is queried and delivered so filtering by borough, date, time of day, series, typology and format responds immediately across the entire catalog.
Maps and Capacity
Mapbox Integration
The whole festival on one map
A custom Mapbox integration places every participating site on an interactive map that responds to the same filters as the list, so visitors can plan a route through a neighbourhood instead of reading an index.
Lottery System
Fair access to the most sought-after buildings
For venues with hard capacity limits we built a bespoke lottery, letting OHNY run a fair draw and manage admissions without maintaining lists by hand.
Built for a Weekend at City Scale
One WordPress installation running an app-grade planner, an interactive map, visitor accounts and a lottery, without changing how the editorial team works.
Accounts and Saved Itineraries
Visitors register, bookmark sites and come back to the itinerary they built, on any device.
Interactive Festival Map
Every site plotted and filterable, turning a programme listing into something you can navigate geographically.
Responsive Filtering
Filtering across the whole catalog is fast enough to explore with, rather than something to wait on.
Lottery-Managed Capacity
Capacity-constrained venues are allocated through a fair, automated draw instead of manual coordination.
One Editorial Workflow
Bringing an external CMS into WordPress meant the team stopped maintaining content in two places.
Mobile-Ready Planning
The planner and the map work on a phone, which is where most visitors reach for them during the festival weekend.
Planning Something at This Scale?
OHNY runs a citywide festival from a single WordPress platform, with maps, accounts and capacity management built in. Let’s talk about what your event or catalog needs.
