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”.
City Church is a WordPress child theme for Builder, a premium WordPress theme created by iThemes. A child theme is simply a different design for an existing theme, and works with the original theme’s structure. That is helpful when you already have a great base (like Builder) and want to offer different designs within that.
The theme comes with staff and sermon post type features built in to help you display that content on your church site well. Like many of their themes, City Church use Gravity Forms and have specific styles for them. I like the variety of layouts you can choose from to determine how you want to display your content.
ChurchThemes.net’s latest theme is Trinity. It has the great look a lot of church themes are going with these days with the navigation, banner rotator and widgets at the bottom for the home page. With the content they loaded in there for the demo the Leadership of that “church” is top notch.
Breakthrough Church in Juneau, AK uses WordPress! Their website is running the Yamidoo PRO theme from WPZoom. They’re using the blog as a Recent News feature which is nice.
Urban City is a WordPress church theme from ChurchThemes.net. I like the layout and the all the great features that are included for churches including sermon media, online giving widgets, people directories, location manager and more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
