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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.

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-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.

Best Sermons Plugin for WordPress: Building It

WP Sermons WordPress Plugin Development
WP Sermons logo and plugin development in Steven’s “kitchen office”.

UPDATE: (2022) This project has been canceled.

There is no ideal sermons plugin for WordPress. The plugins that exist now are either unattractive in appearance, lacking features, buggy and unsupported or don’t work with all the WordPress themes that are available. This is what I’ve observed and this is what I’ve been told by people over the years. The sermon WordPress plugins available now are not useless, but they are not ideal. Churches using WordPress deserve a sermons plugin that meshes perfectly with their theme, that is easy to use and that does everything they need.

We are working on such a plugin and it is called WP Sermons. This is our vision for it.

Church Content Plugin 2.4

WordPress 5.4 is scheduled for release at the end of the month.

Church Content plugin version 2.4 has been released. This version is ready for WordPress 5.4. Additionally, it fixes a bug that manifested on certain servers, improves the French translation, and updates the Google podcast submission URL. You can update by going to Dashboard > Updates.

It’s Our Birthday! Theme Updates, New Theme and WP Sermons

Birthday 6

We’re celebrating our sixth birthday this month. ChurchThemes.com launched as an independent theme shop in September of 2013. We’ve been committed to creating a continually smooth experience for you over these six years. In fact, we’ve released 190 updates to our themes and plugin during this time. We have more updates for you today and I also want to share with you about our new theme and work on a sermons plugin.