Tabbed Navigation, Teams Archives, and Polish Everywhere
The first week of February brought some of our biggest interface improvements yet. We’ve reimagined how visitors browse your people and teams pages, added powerful new ways to showcase your ministry structure, and tightened up authentication controls. There’s a lot to love in this batch of updates.
Here’s what’s new since our last update.
Navigate Your Team with Tabs
What changed: People archive pages now feature a sleek tabbed navigation system with three views: People, Families, and Search.
Why it matters: When a visitor lands on your people page, they might be looking for a specific staff member, curious about your pastoral families, or just browsing to get a feel for your church community. Now they can navigate between these views with a single click.
The People tab displays a clean six-column grid of everyone on your team — complete with headshots, names, and their roles. The Families tab groups your people by household, showing the head of household, spouse, and children together on a single card. And the Search tab lets visitors find exactly who they’re looking for by name.
The navigation includes a smooth sliding indicator that follows your cursor, keyboard accessibility for visitors using screen readers, and remembers which tab you were on if you navigate away and come back. It’s the kind of polish that makes a site feel modern and intentional.
Pro tip: The people archive now loads 24 entries per page (up from 12) and sorts alphabetically by last name — making it easier for visitors to find exactly who they’re looking for.
Showcase Your Ministry Teams
What changed: A brand-new Teams archive displays all your ministry teams in a beautiful card layout, complete with leader avatars, member counts, and optional featured images.
Why it matters: Your church is full of teams — worship, hospitality, children’s ministry, outreach, small group leaders. Now you can showcase that volunteer infrastructure to visitors considering getting involved.
Each team card shows:
- An optional featured image (when you’ve set one)
- Overlapping avatar photos of your team leaders
- The total member count
- A clean, clickable link to the full team page
The cards look complete even when you haven’t uploaded a featured image — no awkward blank spaces. And if you want to hide certain internal teams from the public archive, a simple toggle in the team settings keeps them private.
Use the Page Builder module to drop a Teams grid anywhere on your site, or use the [teams] shortcode for quick placement. Both support layout options: choose between 2, 3, or 4 columns, and switch between grid and list views to match your design.
Pro tip: Team cards now use a 16:9 aspect ratio for featured images, which means landscape photos look great without awkward cropping.
Registration Controls That Work
What changed: The login and registration forms now respect your site’s registration settings — if you’ve disabled new user signups in WordPress, visitors will see a friendly message instead of a registration form.
Why it matters: Some churches want anyone to create an account and access the member portal. Others prefer to add members manually. Now your authentication forms match your intent.
If a visitor tries to sign in with an email address that isn’t in your system and registration is disabled, they’ll see a clear message explaining they need to contact the church to get access. No confusion, no dead ends — just clear communication.
This applies everywhere: the magic link flow, the email verification step, and the registration form itself. Defense in depth, so your member management stays exactly how you want it.
Better Team Card Layouts
What changed: Team cards display member counts only when there are actual members assigned — and featured images use a consistent 16:9 aspect ratio.
Why it matters: The little things add up. Seeing “0 members” on a new team that hasn’t been staffed yet looks unfinished. Now those empty counts are simply hidden until you’ve assigned people.
And those featured images on team cards? They now maintain a 16:9 aspect ratio instead of a fixed height, which means your landscape photos (and most ministry photos are landscape) display beautifully without awkward letterboxing or cropping.
Under the Hood
We’ve added server-side error tracking to help us catch and fix issues before they affect your site. When something goes wrong, we know about it — often before you do. This month we identified and fixed several edge cases that could cause display issues when posts were deleted or data was incomplete.
The Page Builder’s internal components got some reorganization to prevent naming conflicts, and we’ve refined how tab navigation interacts with different page types to ensure it only appears where it belongs.
All of this runs quietly in the background, keeping your site stable while you focus on ministry.
These updates represent our ongoing commitment to making Digital Church feel polished, modern, and ministry-ready. We’re building tools that serve your church — not just with features, but with the kind of attention to detail that makes technology disappear into the background.
Have thoughts on these updates? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to support@digitalchurch.com — we read every email.

