I’m excited to announce the release of the Agency Theme for WordPress. This theme is designed from the ground up to serve the needs of non-profits and organizations of all sizes. I wanted to take the best elements of the World Theme–including the fully widgetized homepage and large header images and move it a giant leap forward. The result is a beautiful theme that is easy to use as it is functional.
The large header can be great for sites that want to use powerful imagery, but in this case, I didn’t want people to be stuck with only one image to use across the site. I added the ability to have a slideshow as well as use featured images in the header on pages or posts. That way you can easily make the pages on your site unique and further communicate your message.
I also created a donation bar which allows you to easily set a fund-raising goal, show your progress toward that goal and also take up donations via PayPal. It’s completely optional so you can use it all the time, some of the time or never. The choice is yours and all of the details are easily taken care of in the theme options page.
The homepage is fully widgetized allowing you to place any content you’d like to right on the front page. I’ve included several custom widgets for featured posts, video, newsletter sign up and twitter to help you make your site.
Agency is cross-browser tested, includes six built in styles, is designed for WordPress 3.0 and includes support straight from the theme author. It’s available now for only $30. Check out the demo and when you’re ready, you can buy it here.
Sometimes churches and organizations need to use a sign up form for an upcoming event, but aren’t exactly sure how to integrate PayPal with their favorite WordPress form plugin so they can take payments along with registrations. I’m a huge fan of Gravity Forms, but there is no built in support for PayPal as of yet, so here’s how I use it along with PayPal for event registrations. If you have another favorite form plugin, please feel free use it instead.
First we need to set up our button with PayPal. You can do this by going to your PayPal account and selecting merchant services as in the picture above or you can use the code below as a template for your button. This code is set to work around your PayPal email address which can have its advantages if you are unable to use the protected version for some reason or another. I’m including this code in a fund-raising section of a new theme I’m developing for non-profits called Agency.
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"> <input name="cmd" type="hidden" value="_xclick" /> <input name="business" type="hidden" value="me@myemail.com" /> <input name="return" type="hidden" value="n=http://www.yoursite.com/registration-paid" /> <input name="item_name" type="hidden" value="Registration Fee" /> <input name="amount" type="hidden" value="20" /> <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=me@myemail.com¤cy_code=USD&amount=20&return=http://www.yoursite.com/registration-paid&item_name=Registration+Fee" target="paypal">Pay and register here. </form>
Here’s a quick run down of what to change in the code. In the second input line, use your email address that is registered with PayPal. The third input line has a very important field, the return URL after someone has completed payment. This is where we will place our registration form. The Fourth input has the name of the item that will be displayed at PayPal.com when someone is paying. The last one is the amount that they will be charged. The last bit of the form is a link that also contains copies of these elements that we’re sending to PayPal.
Once you have your button created, then you will need to insert it into the page or post where you want people to start the registration process. Since all they will see is a text link, you can place this just about anywhere. You could easily include it into a text widget so it could be on every page or post in your site with minimal effort.
Now that your payment link is set, you need to create the page or post where the registration form will go. First we create a new form in Gravity Forms using their visual editor to quickly add the fields we need like name, address, phone number, email address plus anything we need for the registration like a spot for special requests or comments. Once we have the form set up, we go to the page or post where we’d like to use this form and insert it there. Once thing we will want to take care of is to make the URL is not easily guessed. We don’t want people accessing this page or post without first going through PayPal. You can change the “slug” or the end of the URL by clicking just below the title of any WordPress page or post and entering pretty much anything you want. You can shoot for a series of letters and numbers to make it difficult to randomly guess. Just make sure you place this URL into your purchase button and you’ll be set.
So now we have a purchase link that when clicked, takes someone registering to PayPal to pay for the event, and upon successfully paying, they are returned to our registration form where we can collect their information. It’s that easy. I would suggest checking the registrations against the collected payments just to make sure no one slipped through without paying, but you should be pretty secure.
If you’ve found any helpful methods to use your contact form, share them with us in the comments.
We’re preparing to kick of a gallery here at Organized Themes to show off some of the great sites that are using our themes. To help get things started, we’re giving away a Theme Package for you (or a friend if you already have one) to the site that wins best design! Plus you’ll get exposure for your site and your design skills.
All you have to do is submit your site here by July 30 to be considered for the Theme Package.
In my quest to speed up Organized Themes as much as possible, I’ve been experimenting with the settings of the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin and with my web host. Here’s what is working best for me according to Pingdom’s response times (see graph above).
Your settings for caching and minify may be different, but I would strongly encourage using CloudFront vs. the standard S3 environment. If you’re concerned with the speed of your site, I would strongly encourage you to use W3 Total Cache and CloudFront. If you’re using W3 Total Cache, let us know what settings are working best for you in the comments.
As part of providing support, I often get an inside look at WordPress conflicts. If you’re troubleshooting your own site a great step is to disable all of your plugins and see if that fixes your problem. If it does, then you just need to reactivate your plugins one at a time until you discover the conflict. That’s tried and true WordPress advice. But what do you do if you don’t have access to the WordPress control panel? Here is a quick method I use to solve conflicts on other people’s sites.
Thanks to WordPress using absolute links for everything, you now a local copy of the code that WordPress produces. If you open this index.html file in a web browser you will see a copy of your site (complete with the conflict). Now that you have a local copy you can begin to trouble shoot. Next you will need to look for tags where plugins and the theme load scripts. These generally will be at the top and bottom of the page. Many plugins place a note saying where their code starts and ends which is helpful in hunting out the conflict. Here’s how I treat these items that are loaded:
That’s it. Now you know a way to help deduce conflicts in other people’s sites without needing to access their WordPress back end.
As a way to celebrate the start of summer, I’m offering any two of my themes for only $20. Just add any two themes to the shopping cart before checking out and the discount will be applied automatically. Be sure to act quickly as this sale will end on June 1st.
So what are you waiting for? Go pick out some themes and get started on your new site now!
Here are some useful plugins I’ve used to help out churches that I think you might find helpful.
Many churches and organizations like to have an online directory of their staff. While you can create this with the visual editor in WordPress, it generally doesn’t turn out as well as you’d like. A great alternative is to use the Staff Directory plugin to create everything for you. You can add staff descriptions, pictures and contact information. Each member gets their own post as well as the listing in the directory. It’s an easy to use solution for this common need.
This plugin is molded after the All in One SEO Pack, but is much simpler for those of us who don’t need such extensive features. It allows you to easily add title and descriptions to your site as well as any page/post. Plus since it is so simple it doesn’t notify you of updates every other week like some other SEO plugins have a tendency to.
If there is one area that WordPress is deficient in it is event management. I’ve tried virtually every one I’ve come across in the last two and a half years, but none has worked like I hoped. That said, The Events Calendar is the plugin I’m using on my church’s site as well as a few client sites of late. One of the best features is an easy integration with Event Brite so you can have online registrations, even paid ones, with minimal work. It allows you to have recurring events, locations and so on. I also really appreciate that this plugin uses WordPress’ posts function for events as that makes them easier to incorporate into themes.
No one wants to have a server crash and take their data with them, but it does happen to virtually everyone at some point in time. My favorite way to combat this is with the Automatic WordPress Backup plugin. It makes scheduled backups of your database (content) theme (styles) as well as any uploads you’ve made. As a measure of added security it backs everything up to Amazon’s S3 service for just pennies a month. I use S3 to back-up and serve images from 3 sites all for around $1.50 to $2.00 a month. There are other backup plugins, but most of them only back up your database, but believe me, you need to back up everything.
Many churches have asked me about creating member only sections and while you can do that with WordPress, the best solution is to use WishList Member. This is a paid plugin and not a cheap one at $97 per site (it isn’t GPL licensed), but it is effective. I use it myself on Organized Themes. You can create an unlimited number of user roles and have each role access content exclusive to that role. Or you can create blogs just for certain groups at your church. That way people can share personal information in a secure environment. If you need a way to limit access to parts of your site, this is an easy way to go.
Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.
Does your church need an online community, but you find Facebook’s offerings too limited, or perhaps you were displaced by Ning downsizing. BuddyPress allows you to create your very own social network on your website. This places you in charge of your content–something that is often lacking on other networks. Plus BuddyPress now works on regular WordPress installations making it even easier to use.
Whether your church is multi-cultural, or you have a ministry across the globe, Global Translator can help your site communicate by automatically translating your content into 48 different languages. While anyone could use Google Translate to read your site in their language (that’s how I handle support requests in languages that I can’t speak), this makes it even easier by having the content ready in their language for them. To be fair, this is one plugin I haven’t tried, though I will be testing it for this site soon.
So that wraps up 7 More WordPress Plugins for Your Church. If you have a favorite WordPress plugin that your church uses, share it with us in the comments.
