I’ve worked with a company named Think Ministry, Inc. for coming up on a year. We provide enterprise-class church management solutions via a robust database/platform and several other applications. Our main application (MinistryPlatform) comes with its own API as well. Since my main role is Support/QA, I thought it would be good to dabble with our API to understand firsthand how it functions.
I chose to make a “group check-in” application designed for mobile devices. Our churches often ask if we have a mobile check-in application, so I thought it would make some sense to see if I could come up with a good starting point, maybe even an app that would be used by someone. After trying a few mobile frameworks, I landed with jQuery Mobile. It’s basic enough for me to quickly understand, and it did most of what I wanted.
Here were my goals:
- Authenticate and create a user session based on a MinistryPlatform user ID/password
- Restrict log-in to a specific security role
- When a user authenticates successfully, display a list of available events (within x hours of starting, customizable)
- Display all groups assigned to each event, including people who registered via our public portal but were not a part of an existing group.
- Display the count of leaders : participants for each group, and how many are currently checked in.
- Allow the user to tap individual people’s names and check them in to the event immediately.
By the time the application was built, it did all of these (and a few more tweaks/features). It’s now available for download for our current churches, and I’m hoping it will serve as a great example of integrating PHP with our API, and maybe even be useful to some of our churches!