"...highly cost effective."
— Alexander Sawyer What They Say
Home / Blog / Themes

Themes

Hear about our new church themes, discover new features for existing themes and see previews of WordPress themes in development.

Theme Updates for WordPress 4.9 Compatibility

WordPress 4.9

WordPress 4.9 has been released. We tested all of our themes and plugins with it before its public release and identified a couple of issues that needed to be addressed. As such, we released updates for all of our themes to keep things running smoothly on your church’s website. The Church Content plugin does not need an update as it is already compatible with WordPress 4.9.

Maintenance Updates for All Themes

Updates to all of our themes have been made. These are maintenance releases. There are various bug fixes, tweaks and some new translations included. Some of the changes relate to compatibility with WordPress and browsers so it is important to update your theme. Please view the changelog for your theme to see what improvements have been made.

See Our New Theme, Saved

Saved Church WordPress Theme

There’s nothing more exciting for us than to launch a new WordPress theme for churches. We quietly released Saved last week and are making the big announcement today. This is hands-down our most sophisticated WordPress theme — yet it’s as easy to use as our existing line of themes. To make things even sweeter, we’re also offering a 25% discount to the first users (expired).

Best Church WordPress Themes

Best Church WordPress Themes

The best church WordPress themes follow standards and best practices. They do this by supporting a WordPress plugin like Church Content to avoid theme-lock in. Theme lock-in is a common problem that most church WordPress theme buyers are unaware of. It’s a problem that can create hours of extra work down the road. The purpose of this article is to present you with the best church WordPress themes — those which avoid this problem.

When a church WordPress theme is made following best practices, your church-centric content like sermons, events, people and locations are associated with a plugin instead of the theme itself. Imagine your content disappearing when you switch themes. As a result, you might find yourself manually re-adding 327 sermons! Instead, content should be associated with a plugin that remains active when changing to another theme that supports it.

New Features for All Themes

New Features for All Themes

A series of new features and improvements to all of our church WordPress themes has been completed. We spent the last few weeks focusing on theme updates after finishing a set of map improvements to our plugin. The new features include sermon index and child page templates for Exodus and Resurrect (from Maranatha) and an event registration button for all themes. We also updated our sample content to give you a better starting point for your church website.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new with the themes.

Updates for Google Maps

Google Maps

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.

Maintenance Releases — Going 100% SSL

Wrenches

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.