Our newest Church Theme for WordPress has been released. It is called the “Restore Church Theme (Bundle)” and we are very excited to see how churches use it to power their websites. It has already been described by a few customers as the “best website experience” they’ve ever had. This is great to see as many months were put into development of the church-centered features packed into this Theme to make sure we were delivering the best product possible. These are the same functions in our other church theme called the “Growing Church Theme (Bundle)”. The main difference here is aesthetics with a completely new “hipsterish” look and feel with rustic, reclaimed wood as the backgrounds.

All of the functions are plugin-powered and come as part of the theme bundle with auto set-up in minutes. You’ll love using the sermon manager to posts your sermons and organize them by sermon series, speakers, and topic. This allows your listeners to easily find sermons in seconds without even needing to refresh the page.

It’s all totally built to be optimized for Mobile devices so your website users can use all of the website just as easily on their cell phones as they do on their laptop/computer at home.

All of this comes couples with our support to guarantee you get the site set up the way you need to. We’ll be there every step of the way! Updates are also included for a full year to make sure you are always secure.

If you have any questions about this theme, feel free to email us and we’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Our email is support@mintplugins.com and we usually respond in a couple minutes!

Check it out here and see how you can transform your church’s website to something amazing today!

Are you interested in helping to sell our Plugins and Themes on your website/blog? We just publicly launched our affiliate program which will allow you to do just that! You can earn 25% of each sale you refer through your own website.

Right now, this program is only open to people who are using their websites to promote Mint Plugins. In order to be credited for any sales you generate through blogging, make sure that all links to Mint Plugins contain your affiliate URL. There are a few other terms and conditions you must agree to – for example, we aren’t into spam and don’t want anyone spamming on our behalf either – stuff like that.

Basically, we just want REAL people promoting our products to sell to REAL people. If that sounds like it’s up your alley, head over to our Affiliate Program.

We hope everyone is having a great holiday Christmas season! Here at Mint Plugins, we are going to be available to do support all through the holidays to help make sure that your questions continue to be answered quickly and your websites are functioning perfectly.

On Christmas Day (December 25th, 2015) you may notice a small delay if you email us for support – but we will get back to you within the same day for sure – as always! Let us know if you have any questions at all and we’ll be here to help!

I don’t often write about my personal feelings with WordPress and usually focus on technical developments, updates, and improvements. While this blog post falls into that technical category, it also has an interesting, almost nostalgic feel to it.

I started using WordPress in 2004. Back then, I was a Flash Developer. Remember Flash? It used to be all the rage. I was building websites for people in Flash left right and center. People loved them. They were fun, edgy, “outside the box”, and all that good stuff.

With Flash your website could look like almost anything – even if it was very obscure or seemingly random. Want your website to be a picture of a room where people can explore by clicking on random things in the room? Flash could do that – and it did that type of thing really well. It ran similarly to how Apps work today – with a “single page” it would change based on what you click without refreshing and it would change its state with ease and beauty. To the end user, it felt like the mobile apps of today.

However, it wasn’t great for website owners who wanted to update their information. When I built someone a website in Flash, I would compile the entire website into a single SWF file. In order to make a change I would need to recompile the whole website. Websites need updates – and I ended up spending a lot of time doing updates for my clients – updates they could have – and would have been happy to do themselves.

Thus, I looked for a way to allow users to save custom information which could be “pulled in” to the Flash app without me needing to re-compile. This is when I found WordPress. It was my de-coupled user interface where my users could save their information without needing to touch the Flash file at all! It saved me time, them time, and everything was great.

The way I pulled the information into WordPress was using RSS feeds. WordPress would spit out all of the text content using RSS, I would pull that RSS feed into the Flash app, parse it, and place the text where it needed to go on the website. With this system, my users could blog directly onto their Flash websites.

Then one day, smart phones came along. It became clear that websites needed to be responsive and change shape to fit whatever size screen the user was using. It also became clear that Apple was not going to allow Flash to work on any iDevices. With that, Flash was dead almost overnight.

By this point, I had begun to get very familiar with WordPress and started playing around with creating Themes for it. Themes were definitely more “standardized” than the Flash apps/websites I had been building. Navigation was usually where you’d expect to find it (at the top) and, while this was definitely less exciting and less “Wild West” feeling than my Flash design days, it was also good for the end user – as they could use websites much quicker with (at least slightly) more standardized layouts.

Now, almost 10 years later, WordPress has announced that the WordPress API is here and is essentially the new RSS – with more features of course. Developers are encouraged to build Apps by pulling WordPress-saved data into them – the same way I had been doing all those years ago. Now, users can send data to WordPress with the app as well – which makes it so that WordPress itself doesn’t even need to be seen. It can run entirely unseen by both the user and the website owner. If this had been around 10 years ago, I’d have been in Flash heaven.

These days, Javascript has completely taken over Flash’s place when it comes to most functionality and frameworks like React, Node.js, and Angular are taking over – among many many others.

All this feels very full circle for me as a developer and I got hit with a wave of nostalgia when it was announced at WordCamp US 2015 that “Single Page Applications” written using javascript and data passed through the WP API would be the way of the future. It’s funny because it reminds me of nothing but the past – but with some new flavours. It’s interesting to see this type of cycle on something as “new” as the internet and I’m excited to see where it takes us next!

I plan on diving into this new App Style of development with Javascript to power up our plugins and themes even more in the coming months. Stay tuned! 🙂

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.