Blocks for ChurchSuite

Blocks For ChurchSuite allows you to display certain data from ChurchSuite on your WordPress website without resorting to embedding iframes. This plugin provides Blocks that are easy to drop into any page or post. Each block will, behind the scenes, request data from your ChurchSuite feed, and will display the data returned in a similar way to the usual ChurchSuite iframes, but natively to your website. Many aspects of the display can be modified in your theme to make the display match your website theme. The blocks allow you to use a range of attributes so that you can display just the information you want for each part of your website.

Current features include:

• block to return events as ‘cards’ with the event image and details
• block to return events in a ‘list’ group by date
• block to return a full month calendar, for the current month or a date
• block to return groups as ‘cards’ with the group image and details
• All API requests are cached with a 4 hour cache to ensure fast performance

A little Technical information

For the technical among you: This block works on the ‘server side’, building the response which is delivered to your browser from churchsuite.

Support

If you have a problem or a feature request, please send a message to the author.

Demo

Currently there is no demo site, but you can view examples on a church website:

• the Featured Events,
• the Small Groups list,
• the Events List,
• the Calendar

Contributions

This plugin relies on information provided by ChurchSuite using their ’embed’ JSON feed. Details of this JSON feed can be found here:

https://github.com/ChurchSuite/churchsuite-api/blob/master/modules/embed.md

Usage

• For the Event Cards block, place the block into a page or post. Set the name of your ChurchSuite feed in the Church Name attribute (ie. the name that is at the start of your churchsuite url e.g. https://mychurch.churchsuite.com – the name is ‘mychurch’).

  You should see the block populate with events in the editor straightaway

  You can ude the various parameters in the side bar to refine your search for events – see below for the many options

  Because your calendar will have many events, we can limit the number of events which are returned using the Number Of Events attribute combined with the Days Ahead attribute. This latter attribute sets how many days ahead you will look over to find a set of events from. If this is set too large and you have a lot of events, the data request from ChurchSuite will take too long to return. So just experiment until you get the number of events over the time period you want.

  Other attributes allow you to refine the events returned as follows:

  • Start Date – the starting date to look for events
  • Days Ahead – the number of days ahead from the start date to look
  • Number of Results – the number of events to display from those returned
  • Featured – whether to show only events marked as ‘Featured’

  And, in the ‘Advanced’ group you can do further refinements:

  • Categories – only look for events in the categories whose category numbers are given
  • Event Names – Only list events where the string given is in the event title (e.g. ‘service’ to return all services)
  • Sites – if you have a multi-site church, only look for events for the sites whose site numbers are given
  • Events – Only look for events in the list of event numbers (Useful if you want to highlight a few particular events)
  • Merge – List only the first event or all events in a sequence
  • Sequence – Only list events in a given sequence number

  Details of these attributes and their values can be found here:

https://github.com/ChurchSuite/churchsuite-api/blob/master/modules/embed.md

• For the Event List block, place the block into a page or post. Set the name of your ChurchSuite feed in the Church Name attribute (ie. the name that is at the start of your churchsuite url e.g. https://mychurch.churchsuite.com – the name is ‘mychurch’).

  You should see the block populate with events in the editor straightaway

  The comments above about attributes you can set also apply to this block. By default only a maximum of 5 days events are returned, but this can be overridden using the attributes.

• For the Calendar block , place the block into a page or post. Set the name of your ChurchSuite feed in the Church Name attribute (ie. the name that is at the start of your churchsuite url e.g. https://mychurch.churchsuite.com – the name is ‘mychurch’).

  You should see the calendar block populate with events in the editor straightaway.

  Fewer customization parameters are available for this block because only a subset of the parameters listed above make sense for a monthly calendar.

• For the Smallgroups block,, place the block into a page or post. Set the name of your ChurchSuite feed in the Church Name attribute (ie. the name that is at the start of your churchsuite url e.g. https://mychurch.churchsuite.com – the name is ‘mychurch’).

  You should see the block populate with groups in the editor straightaway.

  The only parameter for SmallGroup lists that ChurchSuite supports is the sites parameter, which you will find under the ‘Advanced’ section.

License

The plugin itself is released under the GNU General Public License. A copy of this license can be found at the license homepage or in the top comment within the blocks4cs.php file.