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Sync your website calendar with Planning Center events

MereChurch supports replacing the built-in Events Calendar system with your church's Planning Center Calendar. However, accessing this feature requires a little bit of extra setup work. Currently, an integration is considered custom work and requires an upfront payment as well as an increased monthly cost of $49/mo.

You can reach out to [email protected] for more information setting up your MereChurch website to pull data directly from Planning Center events. Once setup is complete, your sync will be enabled in Settings > Events > 'Sync Event Calendar with Planning Center.'

Attached are instructions for generating the required API keys for setting up PCO Events integration.

Using the Planning Center Integration

The studio has just one block for PCO: 

This block replaces the previous two, which (separately) let you display all planning center events, or three events by a specific tag. Both options have been incorporated and expanded upon into this one updated block:

For the previous functionality of all events without filtering by tag, leave the tag field empty and set the limit to 0. This will display up to 100 events (typically fewer; see below for why) of all categories. For the previous functionality of 3 events with a certain tag, fill in the tag field and set the limit to 3. Beyond these two uses, there are many more available now -- feature just the next 5 events across all tags, or feature 10 from a specific tag, or whatever use the page you're building may need.

 

Why a limit of 100? Why does leaving the tag empty return fewer than 100?

These are both limitations of the Planning Center API. For non-technical folks, an API is a way that Merechurch (or other similar applications) can make use of the data in Planning Center. This is what the keys you set up are for; Planning Center doesn't let just anybody ask it for data so we have to be identified using keys you approve.

The Planning Center API we're using returns 100 events at a time. This is called pagination and is common practice; rather than returning many hundreds of events (a lot of data for them to serve at once) we get it in blocks of 100, and have the option to subsequently ask for more. To keep the page loading quickly, Merechurch asks for just one block -- the next 100 events scheduled. However, we don't always display 100 events, because not all 100 of those events are marked to display in Planning Center. Internal events that are hidden (i.e. don't display in Church Center) are included in the 100 returned by the API but should not be displayed. Depending on how many internal events your church has, this could be the majority of the 100. So, while we have 100 events, we might only be able to show 30 of them. This is disappointing and certainly a limitation, especially if you have a lot of weekly recurring events. We could get more blocks (the next 100, or the next 100 after that) but each request would take time and slow down loading the page. For right now, we've elected to keep it super fast but show fewer events.

This problem doesn't really occur with tags, for a simple reason -- if you're setting tags to display, you're curating resources you want to show. This means not very many of them are likely to be hidden (depending how you organize events in Planning Center) so we can usually display a lot more of the 100 events.

This compromise (between speed and showing more events) was chosen from an information/website layout and design perspective. Having a page with 100 events, many of which are likely to be recurrences of the same event, is not usually ideal anyways. It is typically better to have secondary pages for event tags, or perhaps place a block like this at the bottom of each ministries page (in the situation where events are tagged with specific ministries). For right now, this is the path we've chosen to take. If there's a different use you have, check out this feature request for a "show events through date" setting, or let us know with a feature request of your own!

MereChurch PCO Setup.pdf