7 More WordPress Plugins for Your Church

Here are some useful plugins I’ve used to help out churches that I think you might find helpful.

Staff Directory

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.

FV All in One SEO Pack

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.

The Events Calendar

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.

Automatic WordPress Backup

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.

WishList Member

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 $97 197 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.

BuddyPress

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.

BuddyPress

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.

Global Translator

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.

14 Comments

Anthony Master May 26, 2017

While building a website for a church I started searching for a plugin that would show a daily KJV Bible reading plan on the site. I also thought it would be great if it also included a widget that would show a snippet of the daily passage and then link to the full reading page. I could not find what I was looking for so I started the endeavor of developing one myself. Now I am distributing my own daily Bible reading plugin. I have built this plugin to be the very best King James Version (KJV) Bible Daily Reading Plugin for WordPress. I have set forth to make this plugin very simple and easy to use. This plugin will generate one widget, ‘Daily Bible Snippet’, and provides support for four shortcodes ‘amd_bible_devo’; ‘amd_bible_daily’; ‘amd_bible_rand’; and ‘amd_bible’. I would appreciate it if you would review this plugin and could give it a recommendation. Thank you in advance. https://wordpress.org/plugins/amd-bible-reading/ I am A Master serving THE MASTER!

Reply

    Ramsey October 12, 2017

    Hi Anthony,

    I have installed your plugin and checked it out.
    I have some comments/suggestions:
    1. In the about page the title has a question mark, not sure why: “About AMD Bible Reading?”
    2. It would be good to rename the About page to “About and How-to” or something of that sort.
    3. AMD sounds a lot like the company AMD that produces computer processors and such, it could lead to confusion.
    4. I really like that you have your documentation in the About page and not on an external website.
    5. I added the plugin to one of my pages to test it. I would suggest putting the book and verses below the date and not next to it, for clarity. Plugin looks great!
    6. I like the calendar, makes it easy to switch to other days.
    7. The random verse works very well!

    Thank you for the plugin! Love it.
    May God bless you.

    Reply

Carol May 21, 2013

Thanks for the tip on the Automatic WordPress Backup. Just a quick suggestion on WordPress Plugin calendars, our church uses Connect Daily (MH Software). We were able to easily add it to our church WordPress site. It meets all of our needs including helping us manage our resources. They’ve got a way that we can even use our same calendar inside Facebook. If you want to check them out: http://www.mhsoftware.com/WordPressCalendar.html They’re worth a look. Glad I found this page, again, thanks for the tip.

Reply

    Bill Robbins May 21, 2013

    Carol, I’m glad you found a calendar that you’re pleased with. For years WordPress really had no calendars that were good, so it’s nice to finally have multiple options that work. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

jeff February 16, 2013

Bill – I’m looking for a way to maintain an online staff and church member directory. Basic information – name, birthdays, anniversaries, and email/phone. Looks like connections may take care of this.

But, my other request has bee to set up an announcements / people to pray for kind of area (post?) where an admin would put in the announcements for the week, people who are sick, etc… and have that in a password protected area, and also email members when this has been done.

Would it be best to use the built in USERS function of wordpress, and make each weeks announcements a POST? I’ll just need to ensure that the users are “subscribed to updated posts?”

thoughts?

thanks,
jeff

Reply

    Bill Robbins February 16, 2013

    Jeff, you might look at the PrayBox plugin. It lets you have a section where members can post prayer requests and keep track of them. I personally haven’t run a site that uses this plugin, but I’ve seen a church or two use it. There is a paid version that has some additional features too. That’s where I’d start.

    Outside of that, you could use Gravity Forms and hand create a section. Gravity Forms can be set up to allow people to submit posts from the front of your website. It also works with custom post types so you could create a prayer post type and allow people to use the form to post them. That would be a good bit more work so I’d start with PrayBox.

    Reply

7 More WordPress Plugins for Your Church – Organized Themes | Scion Players August 30, 2012

[…] the article here: 7 More WordPress Plugins for Your Church – Organized Themes This entry was posted in WordPress Guide and tagged backup, buddypress, church, events, google, […]

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jay April 25, 2012

Is the Staff Directory plugin active development now? If not, is there anything comparable out there now?

Reply

    Bill Robbins April 26, 2012

    It looks like they haven’t updated it in a quite a while. There is a recently updated plugin called Connections that can be used to create a wide variety of directories. They indicate that you can use it to set up a staff directory, though I haven’t tried it.

    For my themes, I started building in a staff section using WordPress custom post types. That way the style and feel of the directory fits in neatly with the rest of the theme without requiring any modifications to the code.

    Reply

Andre October 29, 2010

Does your themes support Buddypress, including the forum function?

Reply

    Bill Robbins October 29, 2010

    Great question Andre, but no they don’t support BuddyPress at this time. They are all compatible with “networked” installations of WordPress (formally WordPress Mu) but not BuddyPress.

    That said, if you’d like me to add support for BuddyPress to any of the themes, I’d be happy to do that for you.

    Reply

Bob Martin May 27, 2010

Thanks for the list. I have a question, is the automatic WordPress backup plugin easy to set up?

Reply

    Bill Robbins May 27, 2010

    It is remarkably easy to set up the automatic backups. There are two security numbers you copy from your Amazon Web Services account and paste into the plugin. Then you set the schedule for backups and that’s about it.

    Reply

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