Hear about our new church themes, discover new features for existing themes and see previews of WordPress themes in development.
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.
The Resurrect theme has been updated to version 2.2 (see changelog). This update resolves an issue with the Background Image in the Customizer. WordPress 4.7 included changes that the theme was not prepared for. Additionally, some users on newer versions of PHP were seeing a warning in the Customizer. This release resolves these issues.
The best church WordPress themes follow standards and best practices. They do this by supporting a WordPress plugin like Church Theme 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.
A video background has been the single most requested feature for our Maranatha church WordPress theme. I’m happy to tell you that this feature is finished and ready for you to add to your church website.
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.
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.
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.