As you may or may not already know, WordPress has apps for Android and iPhone/iPad. I love being able to use the apps to manage comments and with the recent updates you can do even more. But, I’m not one to type long chunks of text using my phone so I probably won’t use it to write posts unless I’m in a situation where I have no other option.
WPforChurch has released a new Sermon Manager plugin for your WordPress Church Website. It is designed to help churches easily publish sermons online. You can add speakers, sermon series, Bible references etc. Sermons can have audio files, as well as pdf, doc, ppt, etc adding to them. Video embeds from sites like Vimeo are also possible.
If you need to register for the support forums, use the invite code “sermons”.
Maybe you want to get word out about something your church or ministry is doing and Twitter is one way you want to spread the word. You can use the Tweet and Get It Plugin to have users tweet about something you want in exchange for some type of file they can download. Maybe it’s a song, an e-book, or the pastor’s home address or something else people would find value in. It can be a great way to spread the word and build your Twitter following.
One of the best bloggers and leaders around, Michael Hyatt, utilizes a page peel feature on his blog. At the top right you can see the Click Here image which reveals more info as you mouseover it. It’s essentially an add, but like the Footer Slider, it can be used on your church website to promote something specific. Maybe it’s a big event you do once a year or another way of subscribing to an email newsletter.
I’ve installed and used the same one Michael is using – Page Peel. It’s Flash based. You can get jQuery Page Peel if you prefer avoiding Flash. Here’s a tip, when designing the big image make sure you account for how much of it isn’t seen even when it peels back.
What else do you use to promote things in a way that stands out?
Previously I highlighted some options for adding contact forms to your church website. In this post I’ll share some options for forms that are for much more than contact, including sign up forms for event registration and any other use that’s more complex than a standard contact form.
Solutions that were mentioned in the previous post about contact forms that are also great solutions for sign up forms include Gravity Forms, Google Forms and WuFoo forms. Here are some other options.
WORDPRESS PLUGINS
Event Registration plugin is specifically designed for this purpose and does a good job. It has the ability to direct users to a payment site such as PayPal, Google Pay, Monster Pay, or Authorize.net.
Event Espresso Lite is the free version of Event Espresso, a comprehensive event management solution for WordPress. However, it’s not cheap as the cheapest version is $89.95. If you’re planning on using event registration heavily this would be worth it. Check out the Lite version first as it may have all you need.
3RD PARTY OPTIONS
Eventbrite is a popular third party event registration solution that also works with WordPress via the Eventbrite for the Events Calendar plugin.
Most church websites need to have some type of contact form on them. Contact forms allow you to give people a way to contact you without listing email addresses on the website. If you do put email addresses on your site, you’ll want to protect them. Even if you do, you may want contact forms on your site as well. Here are some options that are out there.
WORDPRESS PLUGINS
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress. It’s extremely customizable but it is not easy to use for anyone who doesn’t have HTML experience. I try to avoid using it for church websites I design because of how complex it is unless the client knows HTML or has used it before and prefers it.
Custom Contact Forms is another plugin that is far more user friendly than Contact Form 7. It is very customizable as well, and the more extensible something is the more complex it becomes to use. Custom Contact Forms has a pretty good balance though and most users should be able to create and modify a form to add to the site. In designing for a client, I would set the CSS for them which simplifies things even more.
Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress plugin you can buy if you want something that has the best of everything mentioned above along with a ton of extra features. Gravity Forms integrates with a number of other web applications such as PayPal, MailChimp and others. Add-on plugins for Gravity Forms are also available to help it integrate with even more applications.
3RD PARTY OPTIONS
Google Forms are a great option for putting forms on your website. It’s included in the Google Docs suite. When you create a form Google creates a spreadsheet to store the entries. When people fill out the form you can choose to be notified by email of a new entry. You can integrate the form into your WordPress site easily using the Google Forms Shortcode plugin. Sometimes you’ll want to embed the code yourself so you can lose the standard formatting.
WuFoo is another great 3rd party premium forms option. Personally, I like the way WuFoo forms look the most and they provide the best usability in creating forms and managing entries. WuFoo integrates with a ton of other web applications I love to use including Twitter, MailChimp, Highrise, and others. It integrates with WordPress through the WuPhooey plugin.
Both Google Forms and WuF0o are great options for forms that are designed for more than just contact. I’ll write about that in the next post.
On Tuesday Roxanne shared some key tips on designing great email templates. With that in mind, here’s a tool that can help with sending mass emails.
If your church or ministry has a Church Management System you may use it to send mass emails to people in your church. If not, there are a number of great mass email systems out there and my favorite is MailChimp.com. If you have less than 2,000 subscribers and you send less than 12,000 emails/month it’s free. The templates are great and easy to work with, the analytics are solid and it integrates with tons of other web services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Eventbrite, Highrise, Salesforce, and others.
The other great thing about MailChimp is that there are a ton of great WordPress plugins for it as well. Plugins to provide a sign up form on your website, to send emails from WordPress through MailChimp, a way to list past email campaigns, and even allow users to subscribe to your MailChimp list as they subscribe to your site.
If you are in the process of designing, or re-designing your church or ministry website you can use a placeholder theme until it is ready. This is especially helpful if you can’t have an old site running while the new one is in development. It’s also helpful if you’re launching a new site and want to build anticipation up to the new site going live.
WooThemes has a Placeholder Theme that is free that is great for that purpose. Couple that with the ability to use different themes on different pages and you can work on the new site while everyone else only sees the placeholder theme on the home page.
A while back I tried to find a way to have a different WordPress theme on different pages within a WordPress website. The reason I needed it was because our church website design was great, but would not work as a blog because it’s designed to have everything on one page. Therefore, you want scrolling at a minimum which isn’t good for blogs. I wanted to have the page that showed the blog have a different theme but I couldn’t find anything that worked. To make it work I simply made the blog a separate site/blog within WordPress and themed it differently. You can see it here.
I recently wrapped up a similar design for a church and found a plugin that easily allowed me to use a different theme on different pages within WordPress. The plugin is fittingly called Page Theme. Once you install it you can find the settings under the Appearance section in the WP Admin. I love it because the user doesn’t have to go to a separate site within WordPress to update the blog.
UPDATE
In order to make this work in the way I mentioned (for a blog), you’ll have to modify the main theme’s single.php to use the blog theme’s single.php, while pointing to the blog theme’s header, footer & sidebar. I did this by copying header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php from the blog theme and putting them in the main theme as templates. So, they became header-blogtheme.php, footer-blogtheme.php, and sidebar-blogtheme.php and I changed the header to reference CSS and JS files from the blog theme folder. You can reference those specific templates but putting the name in the function call, like get_header(‘blogtheme’);
This is required because if not, when a user loads a single blog post it will revert back to the main theme. It’s extra work and I don’t love how much the core theme files have to be changed but it’s easier for the end-user if they don’t have a lot of WordPress experience.
