Gutenberg is the new “page building” editor that will be included with WordPress 5.0 a few months from now. WordPress 4.9.8 was recently released. It asks you if you want to test the beta version of Gutenberg or if you want to stick with the “Classic” editor (what we all use now). We’re wrapping up Gutenberg support for our themes and intend to have the updates available by the time WordPress 5.0 is released. Until then, we recommend using the classic editor for your live site.
WP Tavern is reporting that beginning July 24 with the release of Chrome 68, Google will begin warning users on websites loaded over http. The address bar will show a “Not Secure” warning. Since this will be a traffic and trust killer for any website still using http instead of https, we want to make sure all churches using our WordPress themes are prepared for this.
The first interaction many prospective visitors will have with your church will be in a Google search result. In this article we will walk through the process of claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing. Every church should take the time to do this. It’s free and will make your church more visible on Google.
When we launched almost five years ago, we were one of the first theme shops to embrace a sustainable business model by charging a yearly renewal fee for ongoing updates and support. At that time, we decided to offer a very aggressive renewal discount of 50% which has remained in place until today. Theme and plugin development has become more involved over the years and, as such, we feel that a renewal discount this deep is no longer sustainable.
Deal Ended: This deal has ended. It started on Black Friday then continued through the Wednesday after Cyber Monday.
Black Friday is over, but now it’s Cyber Monday. You’re not too late to take advantage of the biggest discount we’ve offered all year. Get 30% – 65% off everything today. There’s no need for a coupon code. Just add a theme, plugin or renewal to your cart and you’ll get the discount. Our Cyber Monday deal will run from November 27 – 29 (Monday – Wednesday) only.
WordPress 4.9 has been released. We tested all of our themes and plugins with it before its public release and identified a couple of issues that needed to be addressed. As such, we released updates for all of our themes to keep things running smoothly on your church’s website. The Church Content plugin does not need an update as it is already compatible with WordPress 4.9.
Event Calendar Newsletter is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to share about events via your newsletter. It eliminates the need to copy and paste event details from your calendar into Mailchimp or your mailing list provider of choice. The plugin’s automation also reduces the risk of typos, something anybody who’s prepared a newsletter has fretted over.
Brian Hogg, developer of Event Calendar Newsletter, recently integrated our Church Content plugin with it. What this means is that churches using our plugin for events can very easily send out newsletters with details of upcoming events. Brian produced a video showing you exactly how this works. Have a look.
Version 11 of Apple’s Safari desktop browser for macOS was released a few days ago. Apple made a change that affects how background video is automatically played. This broke background video in our Saved and Maranatha themes.
We’ve released Saved 1.1.1 and Maranatha 1.5.1 to fix this problem. An issue with Saved showing linked images with an underline was also fixed.
Renewing your theme and plugin licenses used to be a bit of a hassle. You’d get a notice to renew then have to log into your account and re-enter your credit card number before your license expires. We’ve made things a whole lot easier with automatic renewals.
Updates to all of our themes have been made. These are maintenance releases. There are various bug fixes, tweaks and some new translations included. Some of the changes relate to compatibility with WordPress and browsers so it is important to update your theme. Please view the changelog for your theme to see what improvements have been made.