We have seven product teams here at Planning Center, with one team for each of our seven applications. While each team works primarily on their own apps, all of our developers also work together on an additional “product:” The Planning Center API (Application Programming Interface).
If you’re anything like me (not a software developer) you may have no idea what Application Programming Interface means, nor why you should care. In the simplest terms, APIs enable applications to work together.
Think of some of the outside applications you regularly use from within Planning Center, like PastorsLine, PushPay, or Lifeway Worship—all of these companies built integrations with our apps using our API.
When our developers release a new feature in any of our applications they also update our API so outside developers can build features off of current code. Our goal is to continually improve our API to make it easier for developers to use.
The most recent feature we released to our API was versioning. Now, when we make changes to our API we will make a new version of the API including those changes. However, we will keep the former version of the API functioning so that any outside integrations attached to it will also continue to function.
With this new feature we can improve our own products and API whenever we want to, and outside developers can update their integrations whenever they are ready. As a result, we hope that you will be even more confident in the features you rely on daily.
Our API is open and available to your developers to use for free and they can get started here!
Hope this helps! The Planning Center Team