We have been creating WordPress content for almost 7 years now – initially through our Theme-Based website “Mint Themes” and now also through this website (Mint Plugins). We built quite a few WordPress Themes for Churches aimed at making it simple for a Church to get their website online. Thousands of churches have successfully built their websites with our Church Themes.

We just released our first new Church Theme in 2 years – with good reason for the long delay. We have done a ton of hours of coding to make sure it is the absolute best theme experience for both the site owner and the site user. We think you will truly love the experience of using it. If you’d like to check it out, head over to the “Growing Church Theme Bundle” page.

Old Weaknesses become New Strengths.

With any product, there are inherent weaknesses. The goal of a good Theme Creator is to learn from those weaknesses and make better products. For example, the Church Themes we’d previously built were designed prior to the mass-usage of “Smart Phones” and therefore, the need for responsive design. This made it so that, while we could make those Themes work on smaller, mobile-sized screens, they were never really as good as they could/should have been on mobile.

Also, some of the functionality of the Themes was not as portable as it could have been – simply because plugins for churches were not being built yet. What does that mean? Well, put simply, it means that if you changed your theme, your sermons, events, photos and videos went with it. If you wanted a new layout, the functionality was “tied” to the theme – and you’d have to manually re-create each sermon.

Our sermon manager was also very basic. This was good because it was easy to use. However it was also bad in that there was no way to “group” sermons together. Often sermons come in a “series” and having a way to do this became one of our most requested features.

Another highly-requested feature was the ability to have “Recurring” or “Repeating” events. Churches usually run week-to-week. They might have the same events every week at the same time and the same place. For example, Sunday morning services are usually always the same every week. Churches found that posting the Sunday service as an event became very repetitious and sent us requests to allow events to “recur” – thus only needing to be set up once.

The New Strengths:

Portability

This new theme bundle has been completely built form the ground up to use plugins for functionality. This way, if you decide to use a different theme at some point in the future, your sermons and events can go with it without any issues. This way, you aren’t ever “trapped” at all and are free to do whatever you wish with your website.

Responsivity

The Growing Church Theme Bundle is completely responsive – even though it allows for complete customizability. You are free to completely re-arrange the page with a few clicks – but it will always be responsive. This is something that has been programmed intuitionally and from-the-start. Because we built the layouts to work with our MP Stacks page building plugin, you get both responsive-ness and customizability. It will always look good on any device!

Sermon Manager

The new sermon manager is powered by the “Church Theme Content” plugin which is built by ChurchThemes.com. Because of this, if you use any of their themes, you can easily switch to this new theme – or vice versa. This is a part of our portability mentioned above. But we’ve gone a few steps further than that and made it compatible with MP Stacks as well – meaning you have total control over how those sermons get displayed in a grid. You can allow for filtering using Isotopes, change the number of Sermons per row, sizes, and more! It is something that took months for us to get right – and we feel like it is finally at a place where it will be really valuable to churches who post sermons often. We’ve gotten great feedback from churches who are loving the sermon manager system in the Growing Church Theme Bundle so we feel like we’re on the right track with it! To be honest, we’re really excited to see how it can transform your sermon-section to be really user friendly for your website’s users.

Recurring Events.

Adding recurring event functionality to our themes became a priority after getting so many requests from customers for it. However, it was also one of the most difficult things we’ve had to code. Because time is infinite, it was difficult to decipher how to make events repeat forever without crashing computers. Eventually, after a few months of coding and testing, we came up with a solution that allows events to recur forever without slowing down the system at all.

We added this recurring functionality to our events plugin and also to our MP Stacks + EventGrid plugin – which is what powers the event grid in the theme. Again, because this functionality is in a plugin and not tied to the theme, it allows your events to be “portable” and used with any other theme in the future.

This week we released an update for almost every single one of our plugins – and the Google Fonts add-on for MP Stacks had a particular addition which has already proven very useful to our users – so much we’ve received some “support requests” just to say “thanks” – which is really cool for us!

The new addition is Font Weight controls. In this update (Version 1.0.0.6) , if a font on Google has different weights available, you can simply select the weight you’d like to use for any text area! It’s super simple!

You can get the Google Fonts Add-On for MP Stacks totally free! Download it here.

We released version 1.0.2.9 of MP Stacks this week and one of its main new features is the ability to control text sizes, colors, line-height, and spacing separately on differently devices.

Why have separate controls for different devices?

Sometimes, you might want EXTREMELY LARGE font sizes for your main tagline on your home page. While it might look great on a desktop-sized computer, that same LARGE font size takes up too much space on a phone! With separate font-size control for each device, you can now make it look EXACTLY how it should for each separate device!

Sometimes you’ll want to put text overtop of an image. This is great if the whole image is dark and your text is light in color (or vice versa). But if parts of your image are lighter than others, the text can get washed-out and disappear against the background. This might ONLY happen on a phone-size screen, or an iPad sized screen. With these new controls, you can change the color on the Phone size so that your text always “pops” no matter the screen size.

We made sure to keep these controls simple to use and they only display for the device you need. Simply click on the device you wish to set and change them.

If you have any comments or questions about these new features be sure to let us know in the comments or by emailing us at support@mintplugins.com.

We are big fans of the WordPress Customizer and have built all of our Themes’ basic controls to use the Customizer. However, while there are certain simple things that work great in the Customizer, other things don’t work quite as well with it. When it comes to building products that our customers will love, we want to use the right tool for the right job. We’ve discovered that the Customizer isn’t the right tool for EVERY job.

Goal for this post:

There are many posts on the internet describing the WordPress Customizer’s strengths and they are all great! However, this post is simply an honest look at a few of the key weaknesses it has as well. For this investigation we’ll be going over a few key points, how they are weaknesses, why we’ve decided not to use it in MP Stacks, and have instead decided to move forward with our custom “Brick Editor” for the foreseeable future. This is not intended to “bash” the WordPress Customizer in any way. Rather, it is meant to honestly outline some of the weaknesses it has and reasons for other types of solutions to live alongside it.

Weaknesses in the WordPress Customizer:

• Control Context: It can be hard to understand which options control which parts of the page or site.
• Control Area Size: Some controls need more space than the Customizer Allows for.
• Structure Consistency: The customizer wasn’t built for any specific page structure.

1. Control Context

Control Context is something that all three of the issues in this post are related to. When you first load up the WordPress Customizer, it shows you the controls for your entire website. Some controls are even for pages that aren’t in-view at the moment. This becomes extremely inefficient if you wish to have many controls in an extremely flexible page design. Suddenly, the user is faced with hundreds and hundreds of options and the context of those options is completely lost. They don’t know if a certain setting affects their current page, or a completely different, currently hidden part of the site. Even the slide-style controls recently added to the customizer to help de-clutter don’t help to keep context – in fact they have the opposite effect. If you’re anything like, you might take a break for 5 minutes and come back – only to forget which section of settings you had open – and no way of knowing without clicking back through all the different settings screens in the Customizer.

How the MP Stacks Brick Editor does this better:

Rather than showing ALL of the controls for the entire website at once, the MP Stacks Brick Editor ONLY shows the controls for the Brick (or page section) in-question. By double-clicking on any Brick, it opens ONLY the options for available that section of the page.  This way, the user knows that any change they make will only affect that page section (or “Brick”). This keeps things much simpler – and actually allows for much more control at the same time. You could have thousands and thousands of settings – but the user won’t get overwhelmed because they only see what they need to – when they want to.

2. Size:

The WordPress Customizer takes up a very small portion of the left-side of the page. The reason for this is because of its live-preview nature. When you make a change in the customizer, it automatically refreshes on the right side so you can see the change you made in-action. While this is a great feature, it also has its drawbacks. The small size available to the Customizer contributes to the “Control Context” issue above because once you start to have many many options, squishing them into the side starts to get more frustrating – as you need to scroll for a long time to view each available option.

How the MP Stacks Brick Editor does this better:

Some related-controls work best to be beside each other horizontally. For example, in MP Stacks when using the “Text” Content-Type, you have the ability to set, across different device sizes, the Font Size, Line Height, Paragraph Spacing, and Google Font for each text block. Each of those options sit beside each other horizontally and take up much less vertical space – thus removing the need to scroll.

3. Structure Consistency:

Using the WordPress Customizer can have a bit of a “Where’s Waldo” feel to it at times. You might make a change to a setting and have to keep your eyes glued to the right side to see if you can find where the change has been made – whether you need to scroll to see it – or if it is even on another page. This issue is similar to the Control Context issue as well. One of the reasons it has this problem is because it wasn’t built for any specific type of page structure. While this is good for expandability, it is also a restriction in that it can’t be as neatly organized as a Control Area built for a specific page structure.

How MP Stacks Brick Editor does this better:

When building our Brick Editor in MP Stacks, we thought about Page Structures from the very beginning. All pages built with MP Stacks have the same basic structure: A Stack which contains an unlimited number of Bricks. This structure allows for a much more speedy page-building process – similar to how a paved freeway allows you to go much quicker than a dune-buggy across sand. Sometimes a little bit of structure actually creates space for some more freedoms.

The controls in the Brick Editor are built to be consistent for every single Brick. Each Brick has Background Controls and Foreground Controls – with a neat and organized place for each. Once the user learns this layout for Controls, they know how to change anything on any part of the site. This is in direct contrast to the Customizer, which doesn’t have any real relation to the page structure whatsoever – and while more “free” like a sand-dune buggy, it’s also more random, requires more guess work, has a longer learning process, requires you to store more in memory for future usage, and doesn’t have the freedom of speed that a paved freeway gives you.

Conclusion

All in all, we feel the built-in WordPress Customizer is great for simple things that appear on every page like your Site Logo, Header Content and Footer Content. However, for more complex page elements that require many settings, the Customizer doesn’t provide an easily navigable experience – which we feel our Brick Editor in MP Stacks does a much better job at.

WordPress just released version 4.3. You can easily update by logging into your WordPress and clicking on “Updates” under the “Dashboard” tab on the top left side of your dashboard screen. We’re happy to say that all of our plugins and themes are fully compatible with this update – just make sure all of your plugins and themes get updates when you do the WordPress update as well.

One of the main features in the new version of WordPress is the “Favicon” That’s the little icon that appears in your browser tabs. You can easily upload your favicon (or “Site Icon” as WordPress is calling it) by going to “Appearance” > “Customize ” > “Site Identity”. Additionally, changing your “menu” is done in the “Customizer” as well now. There has been some controversy about whether this is the best way of changing menus in WordPress – but for now, that’s the new way of doing it. (Previously this was done by going to your dashboard and then “Appearance” > “Menus”).

A lot of users wonder why updates need to happen so often – and whether or not they should be doing them. The short answer is that you should always do your updates because they help to keep your website secure – as hackers are always inventing new ways of “getting in”, and WordPress is constantly beating them 🙂 If you don’t do the update, you could be exposing your site to those hackers.

Sometimes, with “big” updates like the one WordPress just released, you may want to wait a couple of days before updating to make sure that any “bugs” get worked out and found by the “more brave” website owners among us – but don’t wait too much longer than a couple of days or you risk exposing your website.

Another thing you need to make sure of is that all of your plugins stay up to date as well. Sometimes, if updating plugins/WordPress/themes has broken your website in the past, you might be wary of doing it again. But even still, you should do your best to make sure you keep everything up to date. If an update “breaks” your website, contact the author of that plugin immediately to let them know. Most good plugin authors will respond very quickly – and if they don’t respond at all, it’s likely best to stop using that plugin because the author isn’t actively supporting it.

If you are particularly web-savvy, having a “staging” version of your website set up is a good idea to test updates before they come out. A staging site is basically an exact duplicate of your website that exists purely for testing updates and changes. If your website is growing or has a lot of users and you can’t afford to be down for even a few hours, it’s a good idea to look at setting up a staging version of your website.

If you have any questions or comments about updates, let us know in the comments below – or drop us a line by emailing support@mintplugins.com. We’ll get back to you very quickly – as helping our customers is one of our favourite things to do!

I’m always shocked when people tell me they don’t have Google Analytics tracking on their website. Speaking from experience, it is really important to know why people are coming to your website. Analytics help you “steer” your business in the right direction. Many websites start with a goal to do “Thing A”, struggle for a year, and then find they are actually getting traffic to their website for “Thing B” – which might have even just been a single blog post about a random/different topic.

[bctt tweet=”Knowing why people are visiting your website allows you to adapt – and it is essential to your online success.”]

Once you find out that 99% of people are coming to your website for 1 single blog post (as I did with one of my websites), you’ll realize that blogging about that particular topic is probably a good idea. You’ve probably just found your “niche” – and you might have missed it all together without setting up some simple analytics tracking.

Step 1 is to sign up for Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Step 2 is to install a Google Analytics plugin on your website. I recommend the free “Google Analyticator” plugin here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analyticator/

This way you know exactly why people are coming to your website and your chances of online success will grow by leaps and bounds!

*If you notice that you are getting a lot of weird websites listed in your Analytics as “referrers”, read our next post about eliminating pesky Analytics Spammers here.

With the advent of social media (almost 10 years ago now), websites have become a little bit of an afterthought – after making sure to keep your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media profiles updated. And without a doubt, this is great practice. But, websites are just as important in 2015 as they ever have been – if not more-so. Here are a few reasons why:

Reason 1: Professionalism.

Reason 2: Consistency.

Reason 3: Control for the long run.

Our newest free WordPress plugin lets you backup your WordPress customizer with a single click! You can even download your backups so you can take them with you to other websites or back them up safely on your own hardrive 🙂

Why backup the Customizer?

The main reason to backup your customizer is because it can be fun to play with the customizer to try out new page designs and colour schemes. But what if you make a mistake and want to quickly revert to a previous setting? Now it’s super easy to do.

You can also develop locally – or on a “staging” website, export the backup, and then import it on your live site. This is a super simple and quick way to move your customizer settings from one website to another.

Check it out here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mp-customizer-backups/

I talk to a lot of people who have built their websites on services like Weebly.com and have outgrown the possibilities with the website system there. Don’t get me wrong – weebly.com is a great starting point for your website – but chances are, if you are serious about growing your website, you will quickly outgrow the limitations that website services like Weebly put on your website.

It is at the point where someone’s website starts growing that they start looking into WordPress – because of it’s amazingly huge extendability. With the use of plugins, your website’s potential increases thousands-fold. You can now install things like SocialGrids which pull all of your latest feeds from Social Media, put Email sign-ups anywhere on your website, use great services like Optin Monster to grow your mailing list, and TONS of other things I could rant on-and-on about but won’t for the purpose of keeping this blog short.

Bottom line: WordPress increases your website potential by leaps and bounds over a service like Weebly.com

Today I was helping a music artist move from weebly.com to bluehost.com so they could set up a WordPress-based website. There is one major “gotcha” that I want to point out to people moving from weebly to help prevent them from making a mistake I just made – causing the artist’s email to go down for over 6 hours – and put me on the phone for almost all 6 of those hours.

TIP: Update your email before you move the domain.

If you use Weebly, chances are you use Google Apps for your email service. Unfortunately, Weebly seems to wipe your email settings from the domain (MX Records for the geeks out there) before transferring the domain. Because domain transfers can take up to 7 days to fully go through – YOU COULD BE WITHOUT EMAIL FOR 7 DAYS! Fortunately in this case it was only 6 hours – but it’s still a stressful period when important emails are being missed.

When you log into Weebly to unlock your domain so it can be moved, make sure to set your MX records manually BEFORE you initiate the transfer. You do that by doing the following:

1. Log into weebly.com
2. Click on “Domain” from the top navigation
3. Click the “Manage” button the right hand side beside your domain
4. Click on the “DNS and Name Servers” tab
5. Under “MX Records (email)” click “Edit”.
6. Add in your MX Records so they look like this (using Google Apps information)

This will help to prevent you from losing your email during the transition period as your emails will continue to be routed properly. I hope this helps to reduce some of the stress for you if you are moving your domain from one service to another.

For moving your data (text and images etc) from Weebly, we recommend that you back them up into a text file and onto your hardrive. Weebly’s migration systems aren’t very well executed and with a manual backup of all your text and images, you can be sure you won’t lose anything. Then, you can re-enter it all into WordPress once you have it set up on your new webhost.

We <3 WordPress

We love seeing people using WordPress because it is truly the best system out there for Websites today. If you need a recommendation for a webhost and you are a small company, I would recommend BlueHost, Host Gator, or Dreamhost. (Note: these are not a sponsored links and we aren’t affiliated with any of these companies so we can’t guarantee a great experience all the time – this is merely pointing in a decent hosting direction). If you are a growing company and looking for a good webhost, I highly recommend looking into Digital Ocean – both for the price and the amazing, rock solid servers. We are hosting this website on Digital Ocean’s servers and it has been great. However, there is a bit of a learning curve so I only recommend it if you have some server experience.