"This is an amazing service"
— Matthew Snider What They Say

Blog

Theme/Plugin Updates and Bonus News

This round of updates makes theme and plugin activation/deactivation and updates more reliable and secure.

Your site connects to our server when activating a license or updating a theme. We run two firewalls on our end that block requests from known malicious IP’s. If your host is running a shared server and one site on it is abusive, the IP might become blacklisted, affecting all other sites on the same server. This makes theme and plugin activation and updates fail. With these updates, connections from your site are now bounced off of our proxy server with a clean, whitelisted IP.

Not only this, but as the NGINX web server has gained in popularity, we’ve seen increased difficulty with license activation. This issue has been addressed by adjusting the way license actions are sent to our server from the themes and Pro plugin. Lastly, we’re now ensuring that SSL certificates are verified when connecting to our licensing server as an extra precaution for security.

Downloads Fixed

An issue has been resolved where certain users were unable to download a theme or plugin that had been purchased even though the license was not expired. This issue has been resolved.

Church Content Plugin 2.6.2 Resolves Event Issues

Version 2.6.1 of the Church Content plugin hardened security issue but at the same time introduced a bug affecting events and recurrence on some hosts. It also began requiring PHP 8. Version 2.6.2 resolves the event issues and also reduces the PHP version requirement to PHP 7.4 since there are still some hosts not yet offering PHP 8 (we still recommend PHP 8.1 or 8.2 as 7.4 has reached End of Life).

Time to Upgrade to PHP 8.1 or Newer

Update: Read about version 2.6.2 which fixes an events bug introduced by Church Content 2.6.1.

PHP versions 7.x and 8.0 have reached End of Life and no longer receive security updates. We highly recommend upgrading to PHP version 8.1 or 8.2 (recommending 8.1 in case any third-party plugins you are using are not ready for 8.2). Hold off on PHP 8.3 for now as the Church Content plugin version 2.6.1 (just released) is not yet compatible.

All Themes and Church Content Pro Updated

Jubilee, Saved, Maranatha, Exodus and Resurrect have been tested against WordPress 6.3 and updated with various bug fixes and compatibility changes (WordPress, Google Maps and PHP 8.2) to keep things running smoothly. The Church Content Pro plugin has also been updated. The base Church Content plugin does not need an update but has been tested against WordPress 6.3 to confirm compatibility.

Theme & Plugin Updates for WordPress 5.9

WordPress 5.9 is now available and we’ve made updates to each of our themes to maintain compatibility. These theme updates mainly concern block styling. Changes were made in WordPress 5.9 that required us to update our styling for blocks in the editor and on the frontend.

Update: Church Content plugin 2.6 was subsequently released on January 31 to resolve an issue with WordPress 5.9. Exodus 3.3.1 was released to resolve an issue with the Gallery template.

[Expired] 40% OFF: Black Friday & Cyber Monday (2021) – First 99 Customers

ChurchThemes.com Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021

Updated: This promotion has ended. Thank you to all who took advantage of our 2021 deal!

It’s that time of year again. We’re jumping on the bandwagon and beginning our deal early. We offered 30% off in 2019 and 35% in 2020. This year we’re offering 40% off which is the absolute biggest discount ever offered on ChurchThemes.com. If you’ve been waiting to get started with your new church site or have been considering upgrading, this is the best time.

All-around Improvements (Update Now)

Each of our themes and our Church Content Pro plugin have been updated for a better experience with WordPress 5.8 and PHP 8.

The core Church Content plugin did not need to be updated. Everything was reasonably compatible with WordPress 5.8 and PHP 8 before these updates so we waited a bit to release them after WordPress 5.8 came out in order to run through a list of minor bugs reported by users over the months. There are other improvements such as automatically linked phone numbers.