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General WordPress information, news and tutorials. While our products are solutions for church websites, some of the information we post is useful to WordPress users in general.

Sermon WordPress Plugins (10 Options Summarized)

Sermon Plugins for WordPress

Publishing and podcasting sermons is a great way for churches using WordPress to reach more people. If you’re using one of our church WordPress themes then you have our Church Content plugin which makes publishing a sermon archive and podcasting sermons a piece of cake. Churches using a generic theme can choose from several sermon WordPress plugins. Let’s take a look at those options.

A Note on Gutenberg Support

Gutenberg Callout

Update: Our themes and plugins are now compatible with WordPress 5.0 and the new Gutenberg editor.

Gutenberg is the new “page building” editor that will be included with WordPress 5.0 a few months from now. WordPress 4.9.8 was recently released. It asks you if you want to test the beta version of Gutenberg or if you want to stick with the “Classic” editor (what we all use now). We’re wrapping up Gutenberg support for our themes and intend to have the updates available by the time WordPress 5.0 is released. Until then, we recommend using the classic editor for your live site.

HTTPS for WordPress: Auto-enable SSL for Free

HTTPS for WordPress Cover

HTTPS for WordPress is critical today. Your WordPress site should always load via https:// instead of http:// because the HTTP protocol is inherently insecure. Installing an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS for WordPress can be costly and overly technical, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ll tell you how to use a free and automatic method so that you can easily begin serving WordPress securely.

Let’s cut to the chase. I’ll start by explaining how to auto-enable HTTPS for WordPress in three simple steps. You can keep reading after that to learn why HTTPS/SSL should be used on every site. In a nutshell, it’s a security necessity. WordPress recommends HTTPS and Google is penalizing sites that do not have an SSL certificate. The time to start using HTTPS on WordPress is now.

WordPress Update Error: Failed to write request to temporary file

One of the WordPress plugins I use on two sites had an update. On the first site, it updated fine as always. On this site (which is hosted on a different server), the plugin update failed with an error message that I had not seen until today.

An error occurred while updating Simple Share Buttons Adder: Download failed. Failed to write request to temporary file.

Sometimes WordPress file and permission errors can be tricky but the solution for this was pretty simple.

How to Add a Category with a Comma in WordPress

Most questions we get relate specifically to our themes and plugins but some are broadly related to WordPress. We think it would be a good idea to answer some of those general WordPress questions on our blog from time to time as a resource for the WordPress community.

A question like this came in today.

I don’t seem to be able to create a category with a comma in the title. “Faith, Hope and Love” becomes “Faith” as one category and “Hope and Love” as another.

The original question was related to adding a Sermon Series but we’ve reworded the question to make it applicable to WordPress blog categories. The problem and solution are the same no matter what taxonomy is used.

How to Disable Comments in WordPress

Disable Comments Cover

Outdated: Please see the Disabling Comments section in out Comments guide for more up-to-date information on disabling comments in WordPress.

“How can I disable comments?”

That’s one of the most frequently asked WordPress questions I hear.

Comments are great, but you probably don’t want to use them everywhere. Here’s a video showing you how to disable comments in WordPress for new posts, individual posts and all posts in one shot.

WordPress Users: Avoid the Theme Lock-in Effect

WordPress Theme Lock-in Effect

How easy will it be for you to switch WordPress themes in the future? Most theme users probably don’t ask themselves this question. Why would you? WordPress lets you switch themes with a few clicks so things should work smoothly. But that’s only the case if your theme was developed following WordPress standards in order to avoid the lock-in effect.

Much has been written for WordPress theme developers on the lock-in effect while hardly anything has been aimed at theme users like you to explain what the lock-in effect is and how to avoid it. I feel this is necessary because there are still many themes built without consideration for your ability to switch in the future.

Nine Things You Should Do After Building Your WordPress Site

WordPress Site To Do List

You heard about WordPress and how great it is for building just about any type of website. You picked a great theme to make your site look the way you want and installed a few plugins to make it do the things you need. Finally, you added your content and launched the site. All done, right?

Not so fast.

Give attention to the following essentials before you consider your WordPress site complete. They don’t take much time but are often overlooked.