Integration for ChurchSuite

Integration for ChurchSuite (AKA CS Integration) allows you to display certain data from ChurchSuite on your WordPress website without resorting to embedding iframes. This plugin provides shortcodes that are easy to drop into any page or post. Each shortcode 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 shortcodes allow you to use a range of query parameters so that you can display just the data you want for each part of your website.

Current features include:

• Shortcode to return events as ‘cards’ with the event image and details
• Shortcode to return events in a ‘list’ group by date
• Shortcode to return a full month calendar, for the current month or a date
• Shortcode 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 shortcode works on the ‘server side’, building the response which is delivered to your browser from churchsuite.

Difference between this plugin and cs-js-integration

We also provide the cs-js-integration plugin. That plugin uses the more recent v3 ChurchSuite API which does not permit such flexibility because it requires you to create a ChurchSuite ’embed configuration’ to pass in the shortcode call. It also does all the work on the ‘client side’ so that the client browser holds the cached data and the client browser creates all the html for output. That plugin use Javascript to create the response whereas this plugin uses php. This server-side implementation can be faster for many repeated requests, and is less speed dependent on the client provision. However the client-side implementation can be faster for an individual user. The cs-js-integration plugin uses Alpine.js to output the HTML, which means an end user could change the output by changing the HTML files without having to get into the php of the plugin. However, the Alpine.js code isn’t straightforward and so this is likely to be of little advantage. Really, it’s simply ‘horses for courses’ – you have the choice of which to use!

Difference between this plugin and blocks-for-churchsuite

We also provide the Blocks for ChurchSuite plugin. That plugin uses the older ChurchSuite API too, but also provides Blocks that work in the Block editor so that the information presented from ChurchSuite is configurable fully through the block editor.

We strongly recommend using Blocks for ChurchSuite rather than the other plugins – it is this plugin which we are maintaining more proactively.

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 shortcode, place the shortcode into a page or post or into a shortcode block. The shortcode will be:

  [cs-event-cards church_name="mychurch" num_results="3"]

  where mychurch is the name of your church and 3 is changed to the number of future featured events you need in a page or post. Use the parameter featured="1" to obtain only featured events. Because your calendar will have many events, make sure you include num_results to get the number of events you want.

  If you want events on a specific day, use the parameters date_start and date_end. If you want events from a particular Calendar category, use category=1 where 1 is replaced by the category number for the Calendar category you want.

• For the Event List shortcode, place the shortcode into a page or post or into a shortcode block. The shortcode will be:

  [cs-event-list church_name="mychurch" num_results="10"]

  The comments above about parameters also apply to this shortcode. By default only a maximum of 5 days events are returned, but this can be overridden by adding the date_end parameter.

• For the Calendar shortcode place the shortcode into a page or post or into a shortcode block. The shortcode will look like:

  [cs-calendar church_name="mychurch"]

  (where mychurch is the name of your church used to get into your churchsuite). The only parameter that might be used with this apart from church_name is date_from which will can be any date which will identify the month to be displayed – so 2025-01-15 and 2025-01-30 will both display the month January in 2025.

• For the Smallgroups shortcode, place the shortcode into a page or post or into a shortcode block. The shortcode will be:

  [cs-smallgroups church_name="mychurch"]

  (where mychurch is the name of your church. The more limited set of parameters provided by ChurchSuite for small groups can all be used.

See https://github.com/ChurchSuite/churchsuite-api/blob/master/modules/embed.md=calendar-json-feed for a full list of parameters that can be used.

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 cs-integration.php file in the top comment.