We started off the day at 3:30 AM, heading out to Dulles airport to catch the early bird flight to Dallas, TX. Thankfully, John and I both got a little shut eye on the flight. After a checking into our hotel and pick up some grub we headed over to the conference center to check in.

Of course, Fellowship Technologies checked us in to the conference using their check-in kiosk, all went smoothly and we were ready to delve right into the sessions. I chose the Maximize Technology track, where the focus is in web integration and data exchange (the F1 API). The first session in the track was given by Tim Hardy on Mass Synchronization with Fellowship One DataExchange. I ended up sitting next to Andy Lang from Bethlehem Baptist Church, turns out that they were already using the API to customize the web experience for their site visitors based on status (member, prospect, etc). In a very kind gesture, he copied the code they used over to my usb thumb drive so that we could use it as an example for our own site.

Tim gave various examples of applications for their Data Exchange API, most of them were about batch synchronization with other sets of data that are outside of F1. He walked us through how you can take data collected via a simple spreadsheet (name and email), convert into XML and using a small app he wrote upload it into F1. The app would work with API to check if the records already existed, if they did not it would create a new record with using a defined status.

As they continue to grow and develop the F1 API, they are working towards REST compliance, which would allow access to the data directly via http requests without having to use SOAP. That is great news for all of us copy/paste engineers because it would allow us much deeper data access without having to delve deep into XML.

Curtis Simmons, with quite a bit of spunk, delivered the next session, Dynamic Websites with Fellowship One DataExchange. Curtis illustrates the two different methods of integrating F1 into your church website, pop-up versus embedded. The pop-up method is just a snippet of javascript that you paste into your site that generates a pop-up login window. The embedded method is more complex because the church site must manage the cookies, but it does allow for a seamless user experience and user personalization.

Tara Coulson gave the next session on, Using CSS to Customize Fellowship One WebLink. A few of the tools she recommended while learning/working with CSS are W3 Schools, css Zen Garden and two Firefox add-ons, EditCSS and CSSViewer. The CSS allows you to skin weblink so that it matches the rest of your website. An interesting trick she mentioned is that you can use the visibility:hidden tag to hide items that you do not want displayed.

During the break I got to hang out with Matt Singley for a few minutes, he brought down a whole team from his church. Chris from Fellowship snapped a pic of the the bald bloggers.

John and I had dinner with Jeff Bull, the Technology and Internet Pastor at Capital Christian in Meridian, Idaho. Jeff just started full time over there and has also started blogging, make sure to add him to your RSS reader.