Sermons-NL

This WordPress plugin brings together church sermon data from different sources that are being used by Dutch churches and presents them as a single overview. Intended to be used on a church’s website to display planned and previously broadcasted sermons.

Services being used are:

• Kerktijden.nl: a website where churches can record their scheduled church services
• Kerkomroep.nl: a website that churches use to audio and video broadcast their church services
• Youtube.com: a website that churches use to video broadcast their church services

External services

This plugin connects to a total of three APIs to obtain sermon data. This is needed to present the planned and broadcasted sermons on the website.

The first API, api.kerktijden.nl, contains data from their own church from Kerktijden, such as the date and time of the sermon and the name of the church service leader. The plugin will send one request to load future sermons once every 15 minutes. It will additionally load the historical archive, up to the number of weeks indicated in the plugin’s configuation page, once every day so that changes of these data are kept up to date. These data entered by the church themselves and are publicly available. “Kerktijden.nl offers local church communities the opportunity to use the entered data to their local website by means of a widget. […] Two conditions apply: 1) The logo of kerktijden must remain visible. 2) The link to kerktijden.nl must remain visible.” (Translated from (https://www.kerktijden.nl/service/veelgestelde-vragen/).) The plugin will automatically add the Kerktijden logo with url to the church’s Kerktijden.nl page when data from this service are shown. This service is provided by Kerktijden: Terms of use: not available, Privacy policy, in Dutch.

The second API, www.kerkomroep.nl, contains data of broadcasted sermons, both video and audio, broadcasting date and time, and potentially additional data such as the name of the church service leader. The plugin will check for life broadcasts every time a person visits the website page containing Sermons-NL data. Additinally it will update the archive once every 15 minutes. The plugin will only be able to retrieve these data when publicly available (a setting in Kerkomroep managed by the church). “The church is free to publish its own church services on its own website. Its archives that are on [the Kerkomroep] servers are and remain [the church’s] property. What you do with them and how you implement these services (via a link or an API or Plugin) does not matter.” (Personal communication from Kerktijden.) To acknowledge the source and for consistency, the plugin will display the logo and url of Kerkomroep if data from this service is shown. This service is provided by Kerkomroep: Terms of use: not avaiable, Privacy policy, in Dutch.

The third API, www.googleapis.com (YouTube Data API) contains data of video’s. The plugin obtains video’s from the channel indicated in the settings page. It will load data from the most recent 10 broadcasted or planned videos once every 15 minutes and will obtain the entire archive (up to the number of weeks indicated in the plugin’s configuation page) once every day. When a broadcast is planned and approaching, the plugin will request the status once every minute, if there is a site visitor. To acknowledge the source and for consistency, the plugin display the YouTube logo with url to the YouTube channel if data from this service is shown. This service is provided by Google: Terms of use, Privacy policy.

For all services, the plugin will only send the settings entered in the plugin’s configuration page to the respective service in order to request the required data.