Introducing the Ministry Theme!

Posted by Bryan on September 24, 2008 under Featured Articles, Theme News | Read the First Comment

The Ministry Theme is the result of a whole lot of planning and work. Our desire has been to offer a WordPress theme to the Christian community that was designed by someone in ministry who knew what a church needed in a web site. Although ownership of the Ministry Theme has changed, the vision is still the same.

• Something that looked nice and clean – a design that featured the content of the site well.
• Something easy to update – and few systems are as easy to update as WordPress.
• Something that was pre-designed to feature the elements that church web sites need the most – events, articles, and lots of informational pages.

We’re still perfecting the theme in the background. We want to create quite a few variations and skins for the Ministry Theme. Some churches need a dark background, others a grunge feel. Every church has its own personality and we hope to create a framework that will feature the personality of any church. We will also be creating a theme options page so that you can more easily change some of the elements of the front page and sidebars of the site. Here’s a feature list…

• Church and ministry-friendly layout.
• DHTML Drop down menu, automatically generated by page structure.
• Tabbed sidebars for a concise way to communicate information.
• Custom pages for home, links, and archives.
• Featured Post on the front page with built-in thumbnail support.
• Sub-featured posts on the front page as well.
• WordPress 2.8 ready, including handling of captions and images.
• Gravatar/avatar support is built into the comments.
• Base theme is relatively image-free for fast loading.

Keep watching for further developments and let us know what you’d like to see in the comments section below.

Plugin & Sidebar Suggestions

Posted by Bryan on under Theme Help | 2 Comments to Read

The tabbed areas at the top of the sidebar can be used for a variety of things. Communicate to different audiences (as shown in the first box) or consolidate basic information (as shown in the second box). The third box on this demo outpus a list based on the WPListCal plugin.

Please know in advance that the tabbed area doesn’t work very well in IE6, but it does degrade. The tabs turn into h2 headings. The drawback is you lose the white background and it stretches the sidebar further down the page. We’re following in the path of 37 Signals in not spending hours and hours of time trying to fix every little detail for IE6. We want IE6 users to be able to read the content, but we’re not concerned with every visual effect going well. It’s time we grew beyond the old and busted browser.

You could also add an email subscription form using code generated by FeedBurner or FeedBlitz or another email and feed list manager.

You could also show recent photos as clickable thumbnails using Flickr and the Flickr plugin from Tan Tan Noodles.