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Switching from Risen Theme

Our very first theme, Risen, has been discontinued after six years. This popular WordPress theme was sold on a marketplace and actually predates the ChurchThemes.com website and the more modern development tools we use now. Risen does not support the Church Content plugin which all of our current themes do for easy theme switching. As such, we’ve made a migration tool to help make your Risen content compatible with our Church Content plugin so that you can switch to one of our newer themes.

We understand this may be experienced by some as an inconvenience more than an opportunity to upgrade to a newer design with better features. We apologize for that. Please consider that for the stability of your site it is important to use an actively updated and supported theme and plugins (our newer themes will support WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg). You can take advantage of our 20% discount and migration tool to help make the transition easier.

How to Switch

Our migration tool will copy then convert content published with Risen’s post types for sermons, events, staff, and locations into a format compatible with our Church Content plugin. You’ll be able to activate one of our newer themes after doing this. Please refer to “Tool Details” at the bottom of this guide for what this tool does and does not convert.

Your Steps

  1. Buy any of our Packages with coupon code RISEN20 for 20% off (all themes and Church Content plugin included).
  2. Make a full backup of your website to be on the safe side (you can make a staging site or “under construction” page too).
  3. Install our Church Content plugin on your Risen site (the conversion tool is included).
  4. Go to Tools > Risen to Church Content while Risen is active then click Make Compatible.
  5. Install one of our new themes and deactivate the Options Framework plugin.
  6. Run the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to size your images for the new theme. You may wish to manually create and upload new versions of some images.
  7. Build your new Homepage according to your new theme.
  8. Edit your Sermons, Events, Locations and Staff pages to use the appropriate Template in the sidebar. See Page Templates.
  9. Widget areas are theme-specific so you may need to recreate some or all of your Widgets.
  10. Replace Risen’s contact form shortcode with a contact form plugin.
  11. Remake any Galleries with WordPress’s much-improved gallery feature.

Be sure to see our Guides to learn how to use your new theme and the Church Content plugin. And know that next time you switch themes, it should be a shorter process since you’re now using our Church Content plugin.

Please Contact Us if you need help with anything.

Tool Details

  • Pages and posts are part of WordPress itself so will transfer automatically
  • The tool converts Risen’s sermon, event, staff and location post types
  • It converts sermon categories (as topics), speakers and tags
  • It will set your Google Maps API Key
  • It will enable the same recurring events functionality (more available with our Pro add-on)
  • It will not convert things considered unnecessary, inadvisable or incompatible such as slides or home boxes (remake your homepage), galleries (use WordPress’s gallery feature), widgets (recreate as needed), shortcodes (not advisable when theme-provided), contact form (use a plugin), theme options, unpublished posts and comments.
  • Risen has a setting for Google Analytics tracking ID. You should use a Google Analytics plugin for that now.
  • Your original content should not be affected because copied content is converted (so you can switch back to Risen).