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Custom Recurring Events 1.0

Custom Recurring Events Add-on

We’re excited to announce that the Custom Recurring Events plugin is now available. This is our first add-on for the Church Theme Content plugin.

What exists right now without this add-on are basic recurrence options for weekly, monthly and yearly. We’ve had many requests for “every X weeks” (bi-weekly, in particular) and the ability to make events recur on a particular week of the month, like “every second Wednesday”. The purpose of this add-on is to meet needs like these in order to save you time (ie. not having to manually move dates forward).

Theme Updates: Exodus 1.3 and Resurrect 1.6

We’ve released updated versions of our Exodus (1.3) and Resurrect (1.6) WordPress themes. These updates address minor issues and prepare the themes to take advantage of new features in the next version of the Church Theme Content plugin, which we plan to release this month along with the Custom Recurring Events add-on.

You can update by going to Dashboard > Updates in your WordPress admin area. You will need to have an active license key for the updates to show.

WordPress Update Error: Failed to write request to temporary file

One of the WordPress plugins I use on two sites had an update. On the first site, it updated fine as always. On this site (which is hosted on a different server), the plugin update failed with an error message that I had not seen until today.

An error occurred while updating Simple Share Buttons Adder: Download failed. Failed to write request to temporary file.

Sometimes WordPress file and permission errors can be tricky but the solution for this was pretty simple.

Support Satisfaction Ratings

December Happiness Report (2014)

December, 2014 Happiness Report

Our support system is powered by Help Scout. It works like email on your end. On our end, it’s a full-blown ticketing system with features that help us provide better support. One of the latest features Help Scout has added is Satisfaction Ratings. What you see above is a summary of the Happiness Report for December that Help Scout generated from support satisfaction ratings provided by our customers.

Please notice at the bottom of each reply you receive from us that there is a place to rate our response as Great, Okay or Not Good. You can also provide written feedback on how we did.

Pricing Adjustments and the Future

It has been more than a year since churchthemes.com launched. We have had the privilege of helping many churches build a new website, for which we are very grateful. We have learned a lot.

Theme pricing has remained the same since launching. Our themes are not at the bottom of the pricing barrel nor are they the most expensive, but they are on the lower end ($30 to $100 being the general range for professional WordPress themes). It has been clear for several months that a price increase is necessary in order to continue meeting the needs of our customers while running a sustainable business.

Theme Updates for WordPress 4.1

WordPress 4.1 was released today and all of our themes have been updated for compatibility.

The new version of WordPress adds several features including distraction-free writing, plugin recommendations and an easier way of choosing a non-English language. Some of the inner workings of the Customizer were improved as well. Our themes take full advantage of this feature and require an update to keep things working smoothly.

We recommend all users update to the latest version of Exodus or Resurrect and WordPress 4.1.

Make Google Favor Your Church Website in Mobile Search Results

It is absolutely necessary for your church to have a mobile-friendly website.

According to KPCB Internet Trends, 25% of global web usage is on mobile devices — and the increase from last year alone has been nearly two-fold in some regions. Expect that trend to continue. Statista forecasts more than 200 million smartphone users in the U.S. by 2017. That’s virtually everyone. Google has said 65% of searches begin on mobile phones. That statistic blew me away.

Because of this, Google recently rolled out a new feature for their search engine that helps smartphone users identify which sites are more worth visiting in search results. A mobile-friendly church website is not only convenient for users but is also a factor in search engine optimization.