One of the least advertised features of many ChCMS solutions is an available API. Several web based ChCMS companies that will be reviewed soon have opened up APIs to their clients. For example, FellowshipOne, Church Community Builder, and Arena offer APIs and documentation to allow developers to build features that are unique to an individual church. Don’t worry, if you don’t get excited about a good API, I can understand. But an API might be exactly what you need for a specific or unusual feature.
What is an API?
The term API stands for “Application Programming Interface” and is an interface that allows you as a church to interact with the ChCMS and create features specifically for your needs. Of course you’ll still need a web developer to design and code it.
Now I imagine that most small or medium size churches aren’t building custom features simply because the normal options are enough. But an API can make a lot of difference for a church, especially if you want to be ahead of the curve with interactive Facebook integration, mobile applications, and other data-intensive uses.
For Example
Imagine that my church wants to build a custom Facebook application for a big event, our Spring Break mission trip. It needs to have some basic information, but they also want sign ups to integrate with our ChCMS system. Well, we could ask a volunteer to manually enter in the data, but we need regular updates, and there will be 200 entries, making the job tedious to say the least. Our best option is to plug into the ChCMS itself, via the API, and funnel the data there automatically.
When you find yourself grumbling about what your ChCMS can’t do, the answer used to be “sorry, it can’t be done.” But today, with a little DIY initiative and the right API, you can make it happen.
FellowshipOne
One of our advertisers, FellowshipOne does a good job with their Developers site by providing documentation and making the process pretty simple. For the techy readers, they use REST (the same system that was formerly used to power the Facebook API) as well as OAuth (Twitter et al). If you’re on FellowshipOne, or the other ChCMS’ that offer an API, be sure to look around for creative ways to take advantage.
So, will you be using the API’s of your particular ChCMS? We’d love to hear about your experiences with them.
David Alan Hjelle says
Just wanted to note that Icon System’s IconCMO has recently added an API, as well. You can see more information at http://www.iconcmo.com/products/iconcmo/api/ or take a look at our new “Developer’s Center” at http://secure1.iconcmo.com/developer/ that allows you to even try your own API calls without writing any code. It’s a XML- and JSON-based and gives the church access to a huge amount of their ChMS data. We have some example code in the form of an online photo directory and a online event calendar. Some of our customers have even written custom financial reports from our accounting system. We’re pretty excited about the possibilities.
Full disclosure: I’m a developer at Icon Systems, and did much of the work on the API. If anyone has any comments or feedback, I’d love to hear it!
Stephen Bateman says
Hey David, thanks for throwing your hat in the ring. That looks great.
I’d love to hear about the stuff your users come up with building on top of it.
David Alan Hjelle says
I think my favorite so far was a HTML page that a financial director at a church programmed that would use our APIs via JS to dynamically build a financial report custom for his church. He can easily email the HTML file to anyone that needs access, and it is always up-to-date.
Our APIs are still pretty new, so I’m looking forward for more cool stuff as time goes on.
Stephen Bateman says
Nice, I love that. As I was researching this article, I realized that some software we built for our finance dept missed an opportunity w/ our particular API.