Two new features have been added to the Church Theme Content plugin with the release of version 1.6. One makes maps easier to generate and the other helps you link our to a third-party event registration service. Here’s a quick summary of each feature.
“Get From Address” Button
When you add an event or location, there has always been an Address field. There are also fields for Latitude and Longitude. When coordinates are entered, the theme can show a map. Until now, you had to enter your address into a form on another website to get the latitude and longitude coordinates for the map. That worked fine but was a bit cumbersome. Now you can just click the “Get From Address” button and the Latitude and Longitude fields will be autofilled.
The Latitude and Longitude fields can still be edited in the rare case that Google Map’s geocoding is not precise enough (ie. the marker does not appear directly over your location). We’re now recommending NASA’s Latitude/Longitude Finder for those cases. It lets you zoom in and click on the map to get a location’s precise coordinates.
Event Registration URL
Galen Gidman contributed a Registration URL field to the plugin. Our themes will support this shortly so that you will be able to enter a URL to a registration form provided by your church management system or a service like EventBrite. Our themes will show a button for registration that directs users to your third-party form.
This is an alternative to embedding a form directly into your event’s content using a shortcode. We updated our tips on Event Registration to cover both methods.
If you’re a theme developer, the new field to add support for is _ctc_event_registration_url (see the Developer Guide).
Updating to 1.6
To update to 1.6, go to Dashboard > Updates. This is recommended for all users.
What’s Next
Right now we’re working on significant updates to all of our themes then we’ll focus our attention entirely on finishing another new church WordPress theme.
9 Comments
Great!! Looking forward to both of these features!
Thanks
Great, thanks. Another thing which would be wonderful for events would be if we could somehow link the event and location post types. i.e. to be able to say “this event is at this location, which I have already entered”…
Thanks for your suggestion. We’ve had other requests for this so it’s on our radar. Let us know if you have any other ideas!
A couple of other ideas, both things I’ve implemented in an Exodus child theme:
I added a “Show venue” checkbox to the CT Events widget – I wanted to be able to show a unified view of services across our three buildings. I’d be very happy to send over the code I added, though I expect you could guess it all very easily.
And, I added a tiny bit of JavaScript to copy the social icons into the mobile menu bar. The code for this I adapted some I found on churchthemes.com :-) where you put the cart icon into the mobile menu.
Thanks for being willing to share your code. I’ve made note to consider a Show Venue checkbox for the widget in an update so others can benefit in the same way as you have.
So glad you were able to add the “Get from address” button. A HUGE timesaver for me. Keep up the great work!!
I’m glad it will save you time! Thanks for your encouragement.
Steven,
Any thoughts on when Exodus will be updated to support the registration Button? No pressure… just wondering if it is something I should try to incorporate in the child theme.
It will be in the next update. We don’t have a release date but if I were to give my best estimate, I’d say within the next two months.
It will be a big update for all themes and the plugin.
Commenting has been turned off.