JustGiving <3 CharityHack 2010

JustGiving <3 CharityHack 2010

Thursday 9 September 2010

So this year @JustGiving we're going to be making a little bit of a big deal at Charity Hack 2010 by releasing the first round of public JustGiving APIs.

The new JustGiving APIs are a suite of RESTful resources covering a few key areas of the site, debuting at Charity Hack 2010 after closed testing as the tech powering the JustGiving iPhone, Android and Facebook applications.

Headlines: JustGiving. RESTful APIs debuting at Charity Hack 2010. Fully documented and with code examples in major languages.

We're covering four key areas: End user accounts, Fundraising Pages, Search and Donation Integration.  Don’t worry, this post isn’t the documentation, instead, it’s a bit of a teaser.

Account

  • Account Registration

Fundraising

  • Get Fundraising Page Details (key page details)
  • Get Fundraising Page Donations (with pagination)
  • Get Fundraising Pages (retrieving all pages owned by the authenticated user)
  • Fundraising Page creation (automate page creation)
  • Update Fundraising Page (to modify details and user stories)
  • Upload Fundraising Page Image (upload new FRP photos to the gallery)
  • Fundraising Page Url Availability Check (check the availability of JG Page Urls, useful paired with creation)

Search

  • Charity Search

Donation

  • Get Donation Status (for a given donation Id, check the processed state of the donation)

Simple Donation Integration (SDI)

SDI is similar to PayPal's Express Checkout allowing partners to funnel their users through the JustGiving donation process as part of the flow of other / existing applications.  It's designed to be partnered with the Donation Status API methods.  The idea is, a user is redirected / pushed through to a web browser directly into the JustGiving donation process.  The user makes a donation and is then redirected back to a call-back Url on the originators domain.  This call-back will optionally pass the donation Id of the users donation on the query string, allowing the destination site to query the status of the users donation.

This may be of extra interest to mobile application developers, as combined with registering protocols for your mobile app in iOS or Android, this will effectively enable you to take donations in your mobile applications.  SDI powers the recently released Facebook JustGiving Charity Gifts application.

I'm going to be there on the day with a few of my colleagues to babysit the APIs and answer questions, but more importantly, I'm going to be there as a hacker. Obviously we can't really compete in any of the "hack offs", but we might well end up cooking up something cool or fun on the show floor.

The APIs we're going out with are RESTful and use XML as the content-type (boo!), but if you dig deep enough, we might well just be respecting other content types (in an unsupported, on the quiet, kind of way) if your client asks nicely (yay!).

Happy hacking!