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News

Stay up to date with the latest happenings at churchthemes.com. This is where we post announcements relating to our business, products and website.

Theme Updates for WordPress 7 Compatibility

Our themes need to be updated to fix issues with the block editor relating to WordPress 7.0. You may have noticed the theme-provided styles failing to load when adding or editing a page, sermon, event, etc. This update fixes this problem and an “invisible” title field that was happening before WordPress 7.0 on some sites. A performance-related improvement is also in this update.

Introducing ChurchHost

ChurchHost Screenshot

ChurchThemes, LLC was renamed Sunday Pixels, LLC earlier this month in order to launch ChurchHost as a brand that compliments ChurchThemes. You can think of these as siblings with Sunday Pixels as their parent. This restructuring also opens up a lot of future possibilities.

We launched ChurchHost because over time we have become dissatisfied with our former hosting recommendations. SiteGround was our primary choice (see our hosting survey results) but they’re not what they used to be. Having to pay extra every month just to be able to download your site’s backups? Come on. We also want to be able to provide you with a more complete church website solution. Now you can deal with the same people for virtually every aspect of your web presence.

What makes ChurchHost different from other hosts? Read on…

2025 Black Friday + Cyber Monday Deal

BFCM 2025 Banner

UPDATE: Deal ended. Thank you to all who participated!

It’s that time of year again! This year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday we’re offering 40% OFF which ties our biggest discount ever offered. In fact, we’ve only offered 40% off one time in the last decade. If you’re ready to get started with your new church site or have been considering upgrading, this is your opportunity.

Be quick, though, because this deal is available only for the first 50 coupon users.

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.

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.