Blocks4CS is a plugin providing blocks that enable display of event and small group data from ChurchSuite in various ways.

Alwyn Barry

Integration for ChurchSuite

Integration for ChurchSuite is a plugin to enable display of data from ChurchSuite JSON feeds

Javascript Integration for ChurchSuite

JS Integration for ChurchSuite is provides ChurchSuite event and smallgroup details for display in a Wordpress website.

Blocks4CS 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.
<h3>Current features include:</h3>
<ul>
<li>block to return events as ‘cards’ with the event image and details</li>
<li>block to return events in a ‘list’ group by date</li>
<li>block to return a full month calendar, for the current month or a date</li>
<li>block to return groups as ‘cards’ with the group image and details</li>
<li>All API requests are cached with a 4 hour cache to ensure fast performance</li>
</ul>
<h3>A little Technical information</h3>
For the technical among you: This block works on the ‘server side’, 
building the response which is delivered to your browser from churchsuite.
<h3>Support</h3>
If you have a problem or a feature request, please send a message to the author.
<h3>Demo</h3>
Currently there is no demo site, but you can view examples on a church website:
<ul>
<li>the <a href="https://www.cambray.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">Featured Events</a>,</li>
<li>the <a href="https://www.cambray.org/connect/smallgroups/" rel="nofollow ugc">Small Groups list</a>,</li>
<li>the <a href="https://www.cambray.org/whats-on/" rel="nofollow ugc">Events List</a>,</li>
<li>the <a href="https://www.cambray.org/whats-on/calendar" rel="nofollow ugc">Calendar</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Contributions</h3>
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
<h3>Usage</h3>
<ul>
<li>
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:
<ul>
<li>Start Date – the starting date to look for events</li>
<li>Days Ahead – the number of days ahead from the start date to look</li>
<li>Number of Results – the number of events to display from those returned</li>
<li>Featured – whether to show only events marked as ‘Featured’</li>
</ul>
And, in the ‘Advanced’ group you can do further refinements:
<ul>
<li>Categories – only look for events in the categories whose category 
 numbers are given</li>
<li>Event Names – Only list events where the string given is in the 
 event title (e.g. ‘service’ to return all services)</li>
<li>Sites – if you have a multi-site church, only look for events 
 for the sites whose site numbers are given</li>
<li>Events – Only look for events in the list of event numbers 
 (Useful if you want to highlight a few particular events)</li>
<li>Merge – List only the first event or all events in a sequence</li>
<li>Sequence – Only list events in a given sequence number</li>
</ul>
Details of these attributes and their values can be found here:
</li>
</ul>
https://github.com/ChurchSuite/churchsuite-api/blob/master/modules/embed.md
<ul>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>License</h3>
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 <code>blocks4cs.php</code> file.

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