Building a custom login for your church website using the API

Posted By: Tracy Mazelin on November 29, 2011

Background

The Application Programming Interface (API) of Fellowship One provides a way for churches to leverage their own church data within custom built applications. This tutorial is going to outline how you can use our API to build a custom login to your church website by authorizing the user based on their WebLink or InFellowship login credentials. This is a 2nd party application and this post builds upon the foundation laid by Jas Singh here. You will find links to the PHP oAuth library and more detail about 2nd party authorization in his post.

Step 1: Build a login form

First, you will need to build a login form requesting a username and password. If the majority of your church has already converted their WebLink login to an InFellowship login, then you will want to ask for their email address…

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Picture this, image updates & creates through the REST API

Posted By: Nick Floyd on May 10, 2011

We just released another API update. You can now create and update images from the People realm:

People Images: Show (3rd) | Create (3rd) | Update (3rd)

Any cool ideas on what you can do with this? Let us know what you’re doing with the API realms via twitter or forum.

Nick Floyd is an Architect for Fellowship Technologies (part of Active Network). Currently he is focused on improving, designing, and building the architecture around the Fellowship One platform. He likes learning about new technologies and languages (the obscure and the vanilla) as well as learning about new trends and practices around getting really good software from development to the users, fast. He is passionate about software development and helping other developers.

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A REST API double shot : Groups and Events realms

Posted By: Nick Floyd on May 9, 2011

We’re back again to bring you two new realms for accessing your data via FellowshipOne. The Groups Realm and the Events Realm are the two newest members of our API family! The Groups Realm opens up access to Fellowship One’s Groups 2.0 features and allows churches and vendors to create new Groups 2.0 capabilities or integrate with other solutions. The Events Realm provides access to a primary event that can be associated with a Group within the Groups Realm.

Note: The Events Realm does not at this time provide access to Fellowship One Activities, Check-in, or Event Registration.

Groups resources

Groups

Groups: List (3rd) | Show (3rd) | Search (3rd)
Group Types: List (3rd) | Show (3rd) | Search (3rd)

Members

Members: Search (3rd) | List (3rd) |…
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Quick people API realm update

Posted By: Nick Floyd on March 16, 2011

One of our consumers was nice enough to let us know about an “undocumented feature.” Normally with bug fixes and small enhancements we’d just deliver the changes and let the docs tell the story, however, this change is around a more sensitive area and wanted to make sure that everyone knew about it.

The change is to Creates and Updates of the people resource on status/comment.

Prior to the change if you either
```
[POST] https://churchcode.fellowshiponeapi.com/v1/people + a payload with a value for status/comment
```
or
```
[PUT] https://churchcode.fellowshiponeapi.com/v1/people/[id] + a payload with a value for status/comment
```
The value for the “comment” node would not “create” or “update.”

This has been fixed to now do what you might expect it to do in your sand box environment and we are planning on pushing the change to production tomorrow. If you have a chance please go check it out and let…
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Introducing the new REST API giving realm

Posted By: Nick Floyd on March 8, 2011

The dev team has been working hard to bring you the next step in the Fellowship One REST API stack - the Giving Realm! We’ve opened up all sorts of resources to help you bring giving into your church. From accounts to sub funds - all the resources you’ve been asking for served up on a RESTful plate.

Realms
You might also notice that we are using a new term to classify our API resource sets: REALMS. Realms are how we will be classifying groups of functionality exposed through the APIs and will help you manage your consumption through segmentation. The realms will provide churches with the ability to allow or restrict what data consumer applications use and they will enable developers of consumer applications a platform to request specific application keys for specific functions a al carte or application keys that cover the entire stack. For instance, when…
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API Strategy & Roadmap

Posted By: Scott Lowrie on August 17, 2010

Looking back, only for moment…

Almost a year ago to the day, Fellowship Technologies deployed the Fellowship One REST API into production. We were excited to achieve this milestone since it represented months of dedicated work by our development team. Since then committed developers, vendors, and our own staff have come together to form a Community dedicated to bring solutions to the church world. I am encouraged and edified by the fantastic work that has been accomplished. Good work!

If you cook it, then you better be prepared to eat it…

We believe that the best way to prove our API can accomplish what others need it to accomplish is to use it ourselves. No… I am not talking about for just some things like a mobile app that does this, or a CMS shared login, or vendor solution integration. I am talking about using our own API for the…
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Staging/Sandbox Environment is Back up!

Posted By: Nick Floyd on August 11, 2010

Sorry for that downtime, but good news…it is back up! Go have fun creating with the API! And we want to make sure we give credit to our awesome TechOps team here at FT for getting the environment back on it’s feet. That’s a group of people that do a ton of awesome work and you rarely hear about!

**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!

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Downtime in Sandbox/Staging Environment

Posted By: Nick Floyd on August 11, 2010

Just a quick note to let you know that we are currently experiencing some unexpected downtime in our Sandbox/Staging environment. Sorry for any issues that may cause you, we’re working to get it back up as soon as possible. For the quickest notification when it is back up (and a lot of other great stuff), please follow us on Twitter @F1Dev!

Thank you for your patience!

**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!

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Variables in PHP

Posted By: Jas Singh on June 1, 2010

This is the second post of a series of PHP Introduction posts. Be sure to check out the first post, An Introduction to PHP and check back for additional posts in the future to learn all about PHP!

Variable Declaration

A variable always begins with a dollar sign, $, which is then followed by the variable name. eg: $color Variables do not have to be explicitly declared in PHP. Rather, variables can be declared and assigned values simultaneously.

Value Assignment

Assignment by value simply involves copying the value of the assigned expression to the variable assignee. This is the most common type of assignment. A few examples follow:
```
$color = "red"; $number = 12; 
```
Reference Assignment

Reference Assignment means that you can create a variable that refers to the same content as another variable does. Therefore, a change to any variable…
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Data Exchange API Fixes

Posted By: Nick Floyd on May 28, 2010

We wanted to give you a quick update to let you know about 2 items that went into our Production environment to fix some bugs in our Data Exchange API. Here are the 2 areas that were affected…
- Communication Audit Dates
  We fixed some issues around searching for communications based on their audit date (creation date or last updated date) and also fixed an issue where the audit dates were not being presented in the results.
- Household Source Code
  We tidied up a couple of issues around the householdSourceCode to make sure it is a unique value within your church, accepts alpha-numeric values, can be cleared by inserting ‘null’, etc.
If you have any questions or comments regarding these fixes, please feel free to comment on this post or head over to the Forums and let us know. Thanks again for being a part of this…
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An Introduction to PHP

Posted By: Jas Singh on May 19, 2010

PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. This blog post is an attempt to give an overview of the PHP language and it’s various features. This blog post assumes that you already have a web server (eg: apache) and PHP installed on your box. You can also use some easy to install Apache distributions containing MySQL and PHP such as XAMPP and MAMP.
So let’s get started!

The default delimiter syntax (recommended) opens with <?php and concludes with ?>, like this:
```
 <?php echo "Hello World!!"; ?> 
```
The other alternative syntax requires enabling PHP’s short_open_tag directive, like this:
```
 <? print "Hello World!!"; ?> 
```
When short-tags syntax is enabled and you want to quickly escape to and from PHP to output a…
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Sandbox Refresh Complete

Posted By: Nick Floyd on February 11, 2010

As promised, we wanted to follow up and let you know that the Sandbox environment refresh is now complete. You can now log in and take a look at your newly copied data from your production church!

Thanks for being a part of the community!

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Sandbox Refresh This Week

Posted By: Nick Floyd on February 5, 2010

We wanted to let you know that we will be doing a Sandbox refresh for all churches this coming Wednesday (10th).

This affects data at the following URIs:
```
 https://x.staging.fellowshiponeapi.com https://staging-www.fellowshipone.com/portal/login.aspx 
```
What does this mean?
- The data that you currently have in the sandbox environment will be replaced with fresh, updated data from your real, production environment.
- It would be a good idea to not work in the sandbox for tomorrow only, while we work on the refresh.
- Additional churches are being set up with their very own sandbox environment, allowing them to get API keys and all sorts of great things. This means the awesome community we have at the Development Community site and the newly released forums are being strengthened with new members!
As always, let us know if you have any questions or if we can help you in any way! We…
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Updates coming to the REST API

Posted By: Nick Floyd on January 15, 2010

This coming Wednesday, January 20 we will be pushing a few updates to the REST API to production. We are excited about continuing to add new features to the API and possibly even more exciting is the fact that all of these updates came from the input of the community! Here is what you asked for and will see in just a few short days…

See the rest of the post here

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Sandbox Environment Down Time

Posted By: Nick Floyd on December 4, 2009

Since many of you, our API consumers are developing in the sandbox environment, we wanted to let you know that we will have a few hours of down time this week due to some preparations for upcoming releases to Fellowship One.

The following are the times that the Sandbox environment will be down:

Friday, December 11 - 2p - 5p CST
Tuesday, December 15 - 1p - 4p CST

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F1Touch :: Fellowship One On The Go

Posted By: Chad Meyer on October 19, 2009

Fellowship Technologies is getting ready to introduce their new iPhone application: F1Touch. The inaugural version of F1Touch uses the power of the Fellowship One API to deliver people information on the go. As a first-party application, F1Touch will be fully supported by Fellowship Technologies and will be made available to Fellowship One customers through Apple’s App Store.

Let’s walk through some of the features available in this freshman release of F1Touch… {Click here to see the rest}

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Ten Commandments of API Consumption

Posted By: Nick Floyd on September 10, 2009

We have created ten basic guidelines for consuming the REST API. The first 5 commandments are to help consumers interact with the API. The last 5 are how consumers can interact with others in the community to grow, learn, and build.

Ten Commandments of API Consumption

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REST API Enhancements / Fixes deployed to Sandbox and Production 09.09.09

Posted By: Nick Floyd on September 9, 2009

The following enhancements and fixes have been deployed to the Sandbox and Production environments:

#918 (Sifter) Add Address / Communication Collection results to people search results
Notes: Now when using the include parameter in People/Search all addresses and communications returned will match data with what is returned when calling People/{id}/Addresses and People/{id}/Communications respectively.
Supporting docs
Ex: people/search?searchfor=fl,ni&include=addresses, communications

#853 (Sifter) Add new search parameter to People search: BarCode
Notes: Consumers can now do a people search by barcode
Supporting docs
Ex: people/search?barcode=12341234

#1037 (Sifter) Returning a 403 instead of oa 400 when churches do not have the association
Supporting docs

These changes will not cause consumer interface contract breakage unless the consumer was checking for status code 400 when…
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Data Exchange URL cut-over complete

Posted By: Nick Floyd on August 24, 2009

The cut-over to the new code and URL schemes is complete. See this post for more information.

If you run into any issues, have questions, or concerns please email us at: api@fellowshiptech.com with the following information (if applicable):

* Church code
* API method that you are using
* Question / Error description
* Contact information

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Important Data Exchange URL changes

Posted By: Nick Floyd on August 3, 2009

In a effort to make a more common implementation across our API offerings and to deliver some much needed enhancements and fixes we have deployed a new version of the Data Exchange API and will be deprecating (on August 17th 2009) the older versions (the existing URLs will still be valid but will not be supported).

What does this mean to you?

The following URLs:
```
 https://services.fellowshipone.com/DataExchange/DataRequest.asmx https://services2.fellowshipone.com/DataExchange/DataRequest.asmx 
```
will need to change to:
```
 https://services.fellowshipone.com/dataexchange/v1/datarequest.asmx 
```
Note: This new URL is available now. You should use it as soon as possible. You do not need to wait until August 17th 2009 to make your changes.

The new service will include:
- Major performance enhancements(queries and business logic have been tuned)
- Major / minor bug fixes
- Major enhancements to XML serialization
If you use the WSDL file in your implementation (most likely but not…
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