I’m excited to announce the launch of Pneuma our first drag and drop theme for church WordPress theme. In Greek, pneuma means spirit or breath and it’s my hope that this theme breathes new life into church sites large and small.
Since I started Organized Themes seven years ago, my themes have used home pages made up of widgets so that your home page had the content you wanted instead of just what I thought would be useful. While that’s been a big help for churches, it didn’t go far enough in creating just about any layout you wanted. Pneuma fixes that.
Page Builder
Now we truly have a drag and drop page builder available for you to use on any page. It uses WordPress’ familiar widgets to add content in creative and unique ways. I’ve built in support for the excellent Page Builder plugin to make doing this simple and without coding knowledge required.
Page Builder breaks its pages up into rows. You can style these rows any way you want. Inside these rows you can create columns where you place widgets. It’s all done via drag and drop. Here’s a quick video to show how it works:
Since Page Builder makes great use of widgets, we’ve included several to enhance your experience with the theme. You can add sermon series, podcasts, staff groups, service times & maps, subscription buttons and more all with widgets. That way you can combine elements that previously only existed on different pages. We also have page templates for these items too if you’d rather not use the page builder for items like yours staff, sermon series and podcasts.
Before settling on Page Builder, I looked at a couple dozen or so page builders out there for WordPress. Page Builder won out because it’s simple to use. There is no lock in. The plugin will copy the content from the widgets to the content area of the page you’re using it on. If you choose not to use Page Builder, you’re content will still be there.
It also has an installed base of over 600,000 sites and a rating of 4.8 stars. That is beyond incredible!
Mobile Ready
Since 2011, every theme I’ve created has been responsive and Pneuma continues that tradition of mobile ready themes. My goal is not to have a theme that merely works on various screen sizes, but instead to have one that really shines. From large displays to small phones, Pneuma will have your content looking and working its best.
So your visitors want to watch last Sunday’s message on their HDTV at home, it’ll look great. If they’re using their phone to track down a map to your church on Sunday morning they’re covered too.
Pneuma also makes your site feel more like an app by only refreshing the portion of the page that changes from page to page. The animation is quick and subtle, but effective at keeping things moving nicely.
Good With Images and Without
While Pneuma makes good imagery shine, I’ve learned over the years many churches don’t have access to good photography. There’s no one around to take pictures in house and the budget isn’t available for stock photography either.
So with Pneuma, I intentionally designed it so that the theme works great if you have lots of imagery to use or only a limited amount. With the web’s current fascination with large “hero” images, giving churches without those resources options is important to me. You can even make good use of the page builder without images too.
If you do have access to imagery, Pneuma will give you good options to use it. Any page can have a slider, or single image at the top. Any widget or widget row can have a separate background image in the page builder giving you really great options. If you look at the home page in the demo the “New Here” section uses an image that way.
Love video? You can use videos in the slideshow or in the content of any page or post. Plus self-hosted and videos from YouTube/Vimeo are automatically responsive for you.
Robust Podcasting
Every time I make a church theme, I look at how podcasting can be improved. In Pneuma one of the big changes is how your podcast feeds are made. I’ve taken the podcast details out of the theme options page and added them directly to the podcast feed page template. It keeps your podcast information in one place which makes updating it easier. We’ve also been able to consolidate the audio and video podcast feeds into one template to make things simpler too.
Pneuma also introduces message tags. You’ve been able to sort messages by speaker and series for a while now. Pneuma adds tags. You can use these to add topics, books of the bible and so on to help organize your messages.
I’m also excited to introduce a dedicated podcast search. Now you can let your visitors search your messages to find previous sermons that you have in your archive. It’s often requested feature that I’m glad to be able to give you at last.
Full Customizer Support
I’ve been a big fan of the customizer since I first saw a demo of it years ago. Pneuma forgoes a traditional theme options page and instead makes use of the customizer for all options. You can see your changes live on your site before you make them.
You can choose fonts (over 600 from Google fonts), colors, background layouts and more all from the ease of the WordPress customizer. See your changes as you make them. Live.
I’m really excited about Pneuma. You can take a look through the demo and see it for yourself. It’s available today for $59.