WtwUk

A simple gem to pull cinemas and performances from the WTW Cinemas website and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'wtw_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install wtw_uk

The gem conforms to the API set down in the cinebase gem, andycroll/cinebase, which provides a lot of useful base vocabulary and repetitive code for this series of cinema focussed gems.

Performance titles are sanitized as much as possible, removing years, subtitle, preview, autism friendly, Q&A and film club markers, and naming National Theatre Live, Royal Ballet and Opera and Exhibition on Screen screenings in full.

No token or setup is needed. WTW's WordPress website runs Jacro's cinema plugin, with a subsite for each venue. Tickets are sold through TapOS, behind each venue's own booking pages.

The gem holds WTW's four Cornish venues, keyed by the TapOS site code in their booking pages: subsites and Jacro cinema ids from the home page, addresses from each venue's page footer and coordinates from OpenStreetMap. Cinema methods make no requests.

WtwUk::Cinema.all
#=> [<WtwUk::Cinema ...>, <WtwUk::Cinema ...>, ...]

cinema = WtwUk::Cinema.new('PLATRU')
#=> <WtwUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   '69 Lemon Street',
  extended_address: nil,
  locality:         'Truro',
  region:           'Cornwall',
  postal_code:      'TR1 2PN',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'WTW Cinemas'

cinema.full_name
#=> 'WTW Cinemas Truro'

cinema.id
#=> 'PLATRU'

cinema.latitude
#=> 50.261851

cinema.url
#=> 'https://wtwcinemas.co.uk/truro/'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of showing dates, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days. The what's on page's 'All Shows' request lists every showtime the venue has on sale, so any range is one request.

WtwUk::Performance.at('PLATRU', from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 2)
#=> [<WtwUk::Performance ...>, <WtwUk::Performance ...>, ...]

performance = WtwUk::Performance.at('PLATRU').first
#=> <WtwUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'Heart of the Beast' # from 'Heart of the Beast (with subtitles)'

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title, e.g. 1971 for 'The Devils (1971)'

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['senior', 'subtitled']

performance.subtitled?
#=> true

performance.festival
#=> nil

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-11-12 11:15:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://wtwcinemas.co.uk/truro/booknow/122882/'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Truro'

performance.cinema_id
#=> 'PLATRU'

Booking links go to the venue's booking page, which holds the TapOS seat selection. Showtimes already passed today have no booking link.

Variants come from each showtime's classes and the title: arts (event cinema: theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, concerts and exhibitions), q&a, relaxed (autism friendly), senior (Silver Screen) and subtitled. Many screenings offer audio description headsets or caption glasses, so neither is a variant. Laser projection, strobe warnings and ticket offers are not variants either.

bundle exec rake          # unit tests against fixtures
bundle exec rake live     # live wtwcinemas.co.uk

The fixture in test/fixtures is Truro's programme, trimmed to a few films with shortened descriptions. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes the markup the gem reads. The unit suite checks the fixture against it and the live suite checks every venue's real programme, held only in memory, along with the venue list and each venue's TapOS code. When the markup changes, update the shape first, then the fixture.

Bump the version, merge, then run the Release Gem workflow in GitHub Actions. It runs the tests, tags the version and publishes the gem through RubyGems trusted publishing.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request