Tech Forum

Hi, I'm a ward clerk in a new ward and our Relief Society would like to make a directory with picture, contact info, plus a little mini bio for each of the women to help them get to know each other. I'd like to convince them not to create a parallel directory, but I don't see a notes field in the technology roadmap for the LDS.org Directory, so I was wondering if there is any kind of api with authentication that we could hook into.

The API's are only available for approved LDSTech community projects. More information about LDSTech projects can be found in articles found in the wiki.

You can submit feedback for Directory enhancements through the LDS.org home page feedback link. This feedback link is also found on many other, but not all, LDS.org pages.

I'm unaware of any plans to make APIs available for use outside of church sanctioned development.

Thank you for the quick reply, it's very helpful. Looks like we'll have to figure something else out for the time being.

You can do an export to Excel to get some of the information. That might help. Make sure you respect the privacy choices that individual members may have made about their personal information.

Your profile doesn't include your country. I'll assume you're in the USA, but in case you aren't, it's especially important, as members in many countries need to "opt in" to sharing their information with the ward membership, whereas the United States is an "opt out" country.

I suppose the Relief Society could do all their own information gathering, which leads to a complete "opt in" system, but that has its own set of problems, too (as you've already indicated). If they proceed with this project, make sure the Bishop approves. It probably needs to have the appropriate church disclaimers, such as "for church use only", etc.

Is there any way to use the existing API in the newsletter? For example, if you had a featured post for the bishopric that displayed Ward info with some directory information, could you have that information come from the directory or is the only option to manually update the list?

shem.simmons wrote:Is there any way to use the existing API in the newsletter?

No.

Are there plans to be able to export a directory list to csv for home teaching route organization? It would be nice to display the home teaching families on a map to see how far the routes are for people. If there was a csv export, that would make it pretty easy to do.

The general trend has been to remove exports. In some case we're told it's to preserve data security, other times we're left to guess.

There are consequences to not allowing downloads of data in formats other than PDF. I was trying to download the home teaching assignments so I can do some work in excel but found that I could only get the report in PDF. But was was able to find an online PDF to XML converter that worked great. I wish that I didn't have to jump through the hoops to get what I need.