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.

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.

WordPress 5.6 is here. That means it’s time to update your theme and plugins to maintain compatibility. This version of WordPress updated the jQuery library, which broke our mobile menu buttons. Many jQuery events were also deprecated so we have replaced them. Please update your theme and plugins from us to keep your WordPress site humming along nicely.