We recently arranged another CiviCRM Meetup in Dallas, Texas. We would like to thank Improving Enterprises for continued use of their facility and Skvare for continuing to organize the group.

Mark Hanna led the discussion on CiviCRM’s mechanism that allows developers to create their own custom API calls. Developers can provide API calls in programming languages such as PHP, Javascript/Ajax, JSON and more. This is a useful feature in CiviCRM because it allows developers to efficiently pre-configure complex operations.

Mark showed the group how to create a custom API call that retrieves a list of organizations in alphabetical order. Using a demo website, he created an example that returned a list of campuses in alphabetical order. The demonstration took about 2 hours to complete, so he used the remaining hour as an open forum. He also provided members of the Meetup a link so they could practice creating their own custom API calls.

The next Meetup will be on Thursday, April 10, 2014 at 6:30 PM. Allen Shaw will lead the discussion on CiviCRM’s built-in mapping tool and how we can use it to add more dynamic information to your maps. Our group will meet at Improving Enterprises. We’d like to thank everyone who could attend our latest CiviCRM Meetup. We’ll continue to do our part for the global CiviCRM community by hosting more Meetups in the North Texas region.