As churches are using PCO People to store more and more important information about the their congregations, we want to make it even easier to get that data in and out. We’ve released two new ways for you to do this by improving our CSV imports and creating an all-new API for developers.

Improved CSV Imports

CSV is a standard file type that is used for importing and exporting data from different applications. CSV files are ubiquitous and supported by most database systems out there. PCO People has supported basic CSV imports since it launched, and now we've made some improvements to make it even better. In addition to importing basic demographic and contact information about the people in your church, PCO People now allows you to import data in to your custom fields as well. Users who are moving from other church management systems will find this particularly helpful. Check out this article about importing CSV files for more information.

New PCO API

We've also launched an all-new API for Planning Center, so that software developers can easily access church’s data. If you or a developer friend wants to work with the data in your account, this is for you.

We know developers are going to like this API because it’s easy to work with. It’s discoverable and explorable, supports two types of authentication (single user HTTP basic, and OAuth 2.0), and is self-documenting. We’re using this API ourselves for some upcoming projects and we love it.

Not only did we build this API for PCO People, but we’ve created new tools for creating APIs from any application built with Ruby on Rails. We’re using these new tools to build APIs for some of our other apps (including an all-new Services API) and hope to open source it in the future as we iron it out.

You can get started at our new developer's site.