6 Handy Plugins for Your WordPress-Run Church Website
ByThis post in the Using WordPress to Run Church Websites series will give a list of plugins to use on your WordPress-run church website.
Here are six handy plugins (bells and whistles) that add function to WordPress and I think may be specifically useful for church websites:
Google Sitemaps — Don’t miss out on handing your church website to Google on a platter! One of the best (and first) plugins to have … for a website or blog or whatever.
Database Backup — You should be backing up your site (and blog) on a regular basis.
Askimet — This industrial strength plugin stops “comment” spam. I get tons of it, but this thing weeds them out.
PodPress — A great solution for starting a podcast with your site (i.e. WordPress blog).
Event Calendar — I have not tried this plugin, but it seems like a reasonable solution for handling an events calendar through WordPress. I’m still fond of MyChurchEvents though for as little as $60 a year.
Sidebar Navigation – Check out these two plugins: WP-PageNavi 2.10 and Collapsing Page Menus Plugin
Bad Behavior is another good spam plugin. I use it in combination with Askimet, and have really been pleased.
I tried the Event Calendar plugin but was not fond of it. I don’t think they have a repeating event category.
I installed WebCalendar and like it a lot. It’s exactly what I needed.
I can show how to use it on a Wordpress page if necessary.
For calendar, I highly recommend trumba.com. They have an amazing array of widgets that you can copy/paste into your site that give you some sweet customization and embedding options. You can edit the css styles for it as well to make it completely embedded into your site.
Our church uses it and we have it now so that people can fully navigate the calendar and interact with it and never leave our domain. It will also do a email mailing list with the next x number of events automatically included in the email.
(I have no affiliation with them at all. Just think their service is far and above anything else we have tried including Google Calendar and WebCalendar and MyChurchEvents)
Thanks for the list of plugins. I’ve been wanting to add more functionality to my churches website.
I’m especially interested starting to record sermons and making them available on the website. I’ll look into the podcasting plugin.
Mark B.,
I installed Webcalendar and like it as well. Can you explain to me how to make it look like my Wordpress theme?
Thanks
Steve
I’m just going to stick with Google Calendar if everyone over me at the church agrees with it.
Free and powerful!