We have released updates to all themes and the Church Theme Content plugin which all of our themes rely on. The main purpose of these updates is to make it possible for you to enter your Google Maps API Key. This will resolve an issue new users were seeing with Google Maps not displaying.
Two new features have been added to the Church Theme Content plugin with the release of version 1.6. One makes maps easier to generate and the other helps you link our to a third-party event registration service. Here’s a quick summary of each feature.
All of our themes and plugins have been updated. The changes include minor improvements and bug fixes. Go to Dashboard > Updates to update. We recommend always running the latest version of your theme, plugins and WordPress for a more stable and secure website. If you haven’t updated to WordPress 4.5 yet, this is a good time (our themes and plugins are compatible).
The primary reason for these maintenance releases relates to our switching to 100% SSL here on churchthemes.com. Now all pages use the https protocol instead of http. This means all data transferred between your browser and our website is encrypted. We formerly used SSL only on sensitive pages like your account area, payment screen and contact form. Now the entire site is covered and we’re one of only 6.5% of sites that score an A+ on SSL security.
WordPress 4.4 has been released and contains many great new features. WordPress is in general very backward compatible but sometimes it is necessary for a theme or plugin to be updated in order to deal with a change made in a new version of WordPress.
Maranatha has come.
After many months of design, development and testing, our newest WordPress theme for churches is available. We celebrated our two year anniversary last month and have learned much from working with thousands of churches since launching. Maranatha is the result of what we’ve learned churches and church website visitors really need.
Maranatha has all the same core features as our other WordPress themes such as sermons, events, people and locations. Let me explain the innovations that make Maranatha different and better.
All of our themes have received a major update. It is important to update to the newest version before WordPress 4.4 is released in order to avoid the possibility of seeing an error. This is not only a compatibility update, though. There have been improvements made to sermon media downloading, a new email field for locations, translation improvements, performance optimizations and more. Read on to find out what’s new.
Update: We announced this update earlier as 1.5. This was a typo. The latest release is version 1.4.
Version 1.4 of our Church Theme Content plugin has been released. This update adds an Email field for locations. Our themes will be updated shortly to take advantage of this new field.
All of our themes have been updated. These updates add mobile support for Livestream, German and Finnish translations and fix a recent issue with some Google Maps not appearing.
Both the Exodus and Resurrect themes have been updated with various improvements including considerations for the Customizer in the WordPress 4.3 release. Both of our themes are compatible but to get the most out of WordPress 4.3 and to take advantage of the other improvements to the themes, we recommend updating to the latest version right now.
We’re happy to announce that the Exodus theme now includes French and Portuguese translations. The theme has been updated to version 1.4.3. You can follow these steps to use one of the new translations.