F1 + EE Module

In preparation for our annual Dynamic Church Conferece — For the past month or so, my coworkers and I have been diligently (read: frantically) working on our respective applications that each consume the brand new Fellowship One RESTful API. I was half of a two-man team tasked with creating an EE module, to allow churches to display a list of members within their own site.

We dubbed it Listee (play on the “EE” moniker). Here’s a demo video…

Without going into too much detail, since that will eventually be posted on our forthcoming developer site anyway, let me just cover a few tech points. It requires PHP version 5, because we are parsing a JSON response. For me, this was the format I’m most familiar with, though the API also supports XML.

It was a cool exercise to familiarize myself with the inner workings of EE, and how the various {exp} tags hook into PHP classes and methods. It was also interesting to learn more about OAuth, though most of the hard work was done by a coworker, who built a library that we used for both EE and Facebook.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The cool thing is, with the lessons learned here, we are going to be able to pass over a good chunk of the PHP code to be used in other content management systems. In fact, there is already an effort underway to integrate Fellowship One with Drupal.