grapeice925's dashboard

Toby, your response times are fantastic - thanks for the detailed response. I guess all of my thoughts about how to use the API sound like I am treating Stafftool like an LDAP of sorts, and I guess this may not have been intended. I viewed it as a really beautiful admin interface for staff and ministry leaders to log in and manage their information, where members wouldn't have login access but get the info they needed through the church site and its API calls to Stafftool. I don't want to force you down a path you didn't intend either, but the stuff you've mentioned so far sounds really amazing. If there's any way I can help with testing, fleshing out ideas farther, etc., let me know. Looking forward to seeing what can be accomplished!

Hey Toby, I actually don't use Ruby on Rails (I wish I had time to learn it!) so I'll be using PHP instead, but I'm hoping it's just as easy to use!

Basically, what I want to do is setup a login area on our website for church members in Stafftool so that they can quickly update their contact information and see any pertinent information about the ministries they are involved in. We could just grant login to Stafftool, but we want to integrate the experience with our website so that we give them the right information where it's most appropriate.

Some of the actions they can do:
0. Login to the members site - hmm, use logins assigned in Stafftool or just keep our own? Is there a way to test authentication using the API?
1. Add or update any contact or personal information about themselves, including photos.
2. View all ministries they are a part of and read about all of the ministries that are available - signing themselves up for one if they are so inclined.
3. Change their contact preferences: this is not only for ministries and getting emails from them through Stafftool, but also for situations like when services are cancelled - do they want to be emailed, or have a text message sent to their cell? That data will probably be stored in a DB on our side, unless Stafftool can handle the storage of this data somehow.
4. Manage their family connections - this one still needs to be thought out a little, and will probably come at a later phase.

On top of this, we want to keep the entire calendar of events of all of our ministries, etc. through Stafftool. So we'd like all public-marked events to show up on the church's site, and specifically, if you are logged in as a member, have the ministries you are involved in show up on the calendar by default.

Then the plan is to allow all church ministry leaders access to Stafftool directly so that they can manage their groups, send messages, etc.

We have later plans to add all sorts of tools to allow ministries to grow and be more efficient in their communications - such as a way for ministries to have their own sections of content, news, etc. For example, if you belong to the Choir ministry, it might be possible to digitally distribute the tracks that will be used for next month's song on this page/section, and get updated about the new files as a message in Stafftool.

And we'd like to start integrating other pieces of information with member information, like possible online giving or just general giving information for the year, where members at the end of the year can print out an auto-generated report of their giving for the year for tax purposes.

Lastly, I think it might be cool to use the API to generate a high-quality PDF document that mimics a printed directory that church members can have. With a PDF in hand, we can go elsewhere (perhaps Lulu?) to have the books printed.

And the list goes on, but at the least the basic pieces are in items 0-4. Thanks for your help on this!