A couple of years ago we developed a cool app for Facebook that allowed you to access your schedule, get notifications and do some other cool things with your Planning Center account right from Facebook. For a while it was the only way to see your entire schedule if you had PCO accounts across multiple churches. But then a year or two ago, Facebook decided to make a big change to what developers were allowed to do. We were no longer able to actually send users of our Facebook App any kind of message or notification on Facebook. At that point, the only real benefit of the Facebook app was seeing your schedule across multiple accounts.

Along the way, we added the ability to link multiple accounts within the actual Planning Center website, basically making the Facebook app a limited version of the My Schedule page within Planning Center. With the new beta version of Planning Center that will be available to everyone by December, the My Schedule page is now at the top of every user's dashboard, making the Facebook app even less useful.

Sometime recently, Facebook actually changed their authentication method which broke our Facebook app entirely.  We spent the morning trying to fix it, but have ultimately decided that since the app doesn't really provide any real additional value anymore, and because hardly anyone is even using it, we would discontinue the Facebook App. If you are one of the handful of users who did find the app useful, we do apologize. To get back this functionality, all you have to do is add a bookmark to your internet browser that points to planningcenteronline.com and then it's a button click away even when you're not on Facebook.

If you have users that have Facebook and not email, you will be happy to know that Facebook now gives users an @facebook.com email address that goes to their Facebook page. You can add that email address to their profile in Planning Center to send their requests right to Facebook. Here are instructions on how a user can claim their Facebook email address.

We know that many of our users desire more social features to be built into Planning Center including logging in with their Facebook accounts. We definitely see the value in those kinds of features and hope to get to them in the future, but for now, we've decided to concentrate on building and improving features that other websites don't offer. Thanks for your understanding!

UPDATE

After receiving so many comments and emails protesting the app's demise, we decided to spend the time to bring it back. We still think most of the suggestions above will be ultimately more helpful in integrating with Facebook since adding someone's @facebook email address is the only way to send them scheduling notifications, but for those who appreciated the convenience of managing your schedule within Facebook, it's back!