What the Planning Center Groups API actually returns
Notes from building against it: the auth choice that's hard to undo, what JSON:API means in practice, and the reconciliation problem nobody warns you about.
Posts
Practical notes for calmer church websites.
Clear thinking about Planning Center, WordPress, and the small choices that make church content easier to find and maintain.
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Can you put Planning Center groups on your own domain?
Yes. Planning Center publishes a Groups API, and a few third-party tools use it to put group content on your site rather than on Church Center.
Building a group finder with filters and a map
Filtering by day, type, and campus is the easy part. Keeping every group a real page while you do it is what most finders get wrong.
Connecting Planning Center to a site that isn't WordPress
Most Planning Center integration writing assumes WordPress. If you're building on Astro, Next, Nuxt, or no framework at all, here's the shape of the work.
How to get Gravity Forms submissions into Planning Center People (and why Zapier can't)
Planning Center's Zapier integration has six triggers and no actions, so a Zap can read from Planning Center but never write to it. What that means for your forms, and what to do instead.
What you should never publish on a public groups page
A group directory is a public document. Here's the short list of things that should never reach it, and what to publish instead.
How to put Planning Center groups on a WordPress site
Four approaches, what each one actually produces on your site, and the one question that tells you which you're looking at.
Church Center, a widget, or your own website: where should your groups live?
Three ways to get Planning Center groups in front of visitors, what each one is genuinely good at, and the question that usually decides it.
Why your church's small group pages don't show up in Google
If your groups come from an embedded widget, the HTML your server sends contains no groups at all. Here's how to check your own site in about a minute.