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Biggleswade Pentecostal Church – Bedfordshire, UK

August 17, 2011 in Blog, Showcase with 2 Comments

Biggleswade Church uses WordPress! Trevor let us know about this site that he designed. He used the free WordPress theme from Site5 called Boldy. There a number of free themes you can get from Site 5 and their hosting is great too.

I like the layout, the navigation, and the way the theme highlights major things on the home page via the 4 primary sections but also includes important information in the widgets beneath that. Designing a church website always involves trying to mesh a clean, simple design with the need to display important information readily.

Visit the Biggleswade Website

Your WordPress Church Website May Be Open to Attack: Zero Day Vulnerability in Timthumb Script

August 16, 2011 in Blog, Tips & Tricks with 2 Comments

An image resizing feature found in the file timthumb.php is used in many WordPress themes and it has been discovered that it is vulnerable to zero day attacks. A zero day attack is used to refer to a hacker finding a hole in software that they can exploit before the original developer knows about it. This particular attack uses a feature in timthumb.php where Timthumb can grab images from other sites and pull them into your WordPress site. Because of how it works, it can also be exploited to grab hacked code that’s used to put malicious content on your site, thereby serving up ads or pages and you may not be aware of it.

You can find out more on Mark Maunder’s blog.

For me, I found all the timthumb.php files in every theme package on every site I’ve done and removed them. Mark has a couple solutions and you can also update the timthumb script to the latest version but I chose to remove it entirely as I don’t use it’s feature on any sites.

Foundation Church WordPress Theme from iThemes

August 15, 2011 in $50-$100, Blog, Themes, Under $100 with 0 Comments

Foundation is a WordPress theme (child theme of Builder) designed specifically for churches. I like the color versions more than the standard one, and pictured below is the Blank version. I like that clean, simple look and layout.

Check out Foundation

Sign Up Forms and Event Registration for your Church or Ministry Website

August 11, 2011 in Apps & Plugins, Blog with 2 Comments

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.

What do you use on your WordPress site?

Thrive Church – Jackson, TN

August 10, 2011 in Blog, Showcase with 0 Comments

Thrive Church in Jackson, TN uses WordPress. Pastor Herb Halstead shared the site with us. I love that it uses the Standard Theme, seeing that I clearly love that theme as I use it on this site and my personal blog. This is just another great example of how you can customize it in so many different ways and still get all the great functionality that comes with it.

Visit the Thrive Church Website

Contact Forms for Your Church or Ministry Website

August 9, 2011 in Apps & Plugins, Blog with 2 Comments

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.

What do you use for contact forms on your church website?

WP-Church Theme From Netstudio

August 1, 2011 in Blog, Themes, Under $100, Under $50 with 0 Comments

WP-Church Theme is a theme from Netstudio. It’s a simple layout with the main focus on the home page ad rotator. The countdown timer, event and news integration and message section are a nice touch. It’s a great deal at just $35. I can’t get over how the images on the home page lead you to believe that church is set on a farm. It’s available on ThemeForest.net.

Check Out WP-Church Theme

Send Us Your WordPress Ministry Website Links

July 26, 2011 in Announcements, Blog with 3 Comments

One of the things we like to do is showcase ministry websites that are running on WordPress. It helps all of us learn from the different designs and different features being used. We don’t feature every site we come across but would love for you to send us links to your ministry/church website that’s running on WordPress. You can send us your site one of two ways:

Through our contact page

@ reply us on twitter

Thanks!

Religious Church Theme Available at ThemeForest.net

July 25, 2011 in Blog, Themes, Under $100, Under $50 with 0 Comments

Glossycat created a WordPress theme for churches called Religious. It’s only $30 and it is built to handle a ton of content with different ways of linking to it and displaying it.

Check Out Religious

A Great Tool for Newsletters and Mass Emails that Works with WordPress

July 21, 2011 in Apps & Plugins, Blog with 0 Comments

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.

What do you use for mass emails? Anything in WordPress?

Check out MailChimp

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