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A WordPress Plugin for integrating with TouchPoint Church Management Software.

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TouchPoint WP

A WordPress Plugin for integrating with TouchPoint Church Management Software.

Developed by Tenth Presbyterian Church for their website and released under the AGPL License. This plugin is not developed or supported by TouchPoint. While their support team is stellar, they probably won't be able to help you with this.

See the Wiki for Installation instructions and other documentation. Sign up here for occasional, non-annoying email updates.

If you're a developer looking to leverage this for a church, you're welcome to browse the source code, but we also have API docs here.

Features

Involvement Lists & Small Group Finder

  • Publish a list and map of involvements, with dynamic filtering based on actual data, such as demographics and location.
    • e.g. filter Small Groups by Age and Prevailing Marital Status based on the people in the involvement. You don't need to change any per-group settings, just keep the roster up to date.
  • Suggest Small Groups physically nearby based on geolocation.
  • Allow website guests to easily contact leaders or join a group, without exposing leaders' contact info publicly.
  • Includes Search Engine optimizing metadata.

Small Groups Example. Classes Example.

Crazy-Simple RSVP interface

Let folks RSVP for an event for each member in their family in just a few clicks. No login required, just an email address and zip code.

People Lists

Show your Staff members, Elders, or other collections of people, automatically kept in sync with TouchPoint. Example. (This example and others like is are 100% updated from TouchPoint, including the titles and social links.)

Outreach Partners

Automatically import partner bios and info from TouchPoint for display on your public website, with appropriate care for their security. Example.

Events

Improve display of events in the TouchPoint Custom Mobile App by providing content from The Events Calendar Plugin by ModernTribe. This is compatible with both the free and "Pro" versions.

Authentication (Beta)

Authenticate TouchPoint users to WordPress, so you can know your website users.

Costs & Considerations

This plugin is FREE! We developed this plugin for us, but want to share it with any other churches that would benefit from it. If you already have a WordPress website, you can probably get started in about five minutes.

If you're considering whether WordPress is the right tool for your church, here were the factors that led us this direction:

  • WordPress is very widely supported, and it's easy to find developers who are familiar with it when custom work is needed.
  • The WordPress ecosystem has thousands of themes and plugins available to do just about anything.
  • WordPress itself is free, very powerful, ridiculously flexible, and extremely well documented.
  • Other bespoke CMS platforms come and go with the startups that create them. WordPress isn't going anywhere.
  • We own 100% of our content, and we have total control over it.
  • WordPress can be complicated, but we have the technical staff to support and configure it.

If you're not sure whether WordPress is the right tool for you, feel free to get in touch. We can also have good relationships with several firms who could help with the setup and technical maintenance if you're interested. But, it's probably not the right tool for every church.

Future Features

  • Authenticate
    • Track viewership of webpages and web resources non-anonymously. (Know who attended your virtual worship service.)
    • Sync WordPress Permissions with TouchPoint involvements or roles.
  • Events
    • Sync TouchPoint Meetings with events on your public web calendar.
  • Small Groups
    • Suggest demographically-targeted small groups.
  • Integrated Directory
    • Find someone's contact info by typing their name into the standard site search bar.
  • Prayer Requests
    • Collect prayer requests through a form, and display them to people with the appropriate access roles.

Requirements

Making this work requires notable configuration of your TouchPoint database. We've scripted what we can, and the remainder is in the Installation Instructions.

Some features require other plugins, which may have fees attached.

You will need a TouchPoint user account with API-level access. New TouchPoint databases do not have one by default. If your church doesn't have one, open a support ticket with TouchPoint to create one, referencing this plugin.

If you're using the Authentication component, your WordPress site MUST use HTTPS with a valid certificate.

We don't promise support for old versions of WordPress or PHP. You will need to keep both up to date.

Multisite Support

At the moment, this plugin won't perform very well in a multisite environment. We're working on that, though, as we plan on moving our own infrastructure toward multisite soon. As currently planned, ALL sites in a multisite network will share ONE TouchPoint connection, and many (though not all) of the settings would be shared across the network. If you're interested in using this plugin in a multisite environment, please get in touch.

Credit & Hat-Tips

This plugin uses PSR-12 coding standards, which are significantly different from the WordPress standards, but are easier for working in OOP. This plugin heavily uses OOP.

Several plugins have lended structure, code, or inspiration to this plugin:

Other Software Used Within this Software

License

This plugin is released under the AGPL, which is "very strong copy-left". Therefore, if you change this code and use it in production, you MUST make your changes available.

Support

We're a church, not a software company. However, we really do want to see you thrive. While we won't make any guarantees about support, we do try to be pretty responsive in troubleshooting. Get in touch or open an issue if you have questions.