Latest Changes

v3.1.0August 1, 2023

Digital Church Platform has integrated with other platforms and services since the very beginning, but often times, those integrations were hard to identify because they were baked into specific features. For instance, in our giving settings page, you could select a giving provider to use with your church website. Once it was setup, it would integrate that provider on any page that used the

shortcode.

Logos Bible Reftagger Integration

Recently, we decided that it was time to elevate our integrations and to begin to offer some specific features that could be applied to the whole site. One of those is the Logos Bible Reftagger. When you enable this feature, a script is included on every page of your website. It silently scans your content for bible references and if it finds any, it will automatically generate a link that opens the scripture up in a small pop-up window so users can see the reference for themselves.

You’ll be able to find the Logos Bible Reftagger integration in your dashboard, under Settings > Integrations. There, you can enable the integration and select a default translation from the options listed. Once you have it set, be sure to clear the cache by hovering over the lighting bolt in the top right corner of your dashboard and selecting the “Refresh All Pages” option. That should ensure that every page of your site is regenerated for visitors with the new integration active.

As always, be sure to test it out by visiting your website in a private or incognito window.

Planning Center Online Integration

In addition to the existing Planning Center Giving integration, we are now also offering a site-wide Planning Center integration. You’ll also find this on the Settings > Integrations page in your dashboard. With this integration, you can now add Planning Center Forms anywhere on your website by adding a link to the form and including a special URL handler to the end of the link to activate the form. Here’s a help guide we put together to explain exactly how to do it:

Add a Planning Center Form to my Website

v3.0.0March 30, 2023

Over the last year, we have been building and preparing to launch a new version of our Digital Church Platform that enables us to continue to build better features moving forward. Today, we are accouncing the release of Digital Church 3.0.

Noticable Changes

While this release focuses on the registration process for new accounts and the underlying architecture of our platform, there are a few small items you’ll notice that have been added recently. Here’s a rundown of what you may discover:

A New CSS Utility Class

We’ve begun setting up some more CSS utility classes for shadows. We’re using tailwind-css as a guide to add our own globally available CSS code for our templates that you can also use. You can reference those css classes in Tailwind CSS Documentation. We are working on a full implementation of Tailwind in the future, but for now, we are simply borrowing their classes for our own global css.

File Download Field for People

We’ve had a few requests for people to have the ability to define a download link for personal press kits, resumes, etc. You’ll now see that there is a new field avialable when editing people. If you want to be able to display a button or link on the front end of your website, you may need to ask us to update your frontend layout. Just reach out to us via chat and we’ll be glad to help.

Connect Cards can now Redirect to Latest Blog Post

We’ve had a feature available for a while that would allow you to set a connect card to be immedeately redirected to the latest sermon. This was a great way to make it so people can easily get to the latest sermon from the connect page. You could even pre-publish a sermon ahead of Sunday Morning and use the latest sermon as a source for sermon notes and downloads during the sermon (and then update later with the video and audio files). Well, now you can have a latest blog post card as well that will redirect the user to the latest post. Blog posts are a great way to publish announcements and follow up from major events in your church.

Using WordPress Archive Pages for Connect Cards

When we launched our platform, we started out by creating normal static pages for things like connect cards. This made it a little easier for you to know how to edit those pages. However, it came with a bit of a cost. When you added a new connect card, the cache for the connect page didn’t refresh automatically. So we’re moving toward using the WordPress archive for connect cards. We’re still using the page builder to build them, and you’ll still be able to customize them. This new approach makes it so the cache refreshes a little more reliably so your connect cards are immedeately available to your users.

Note: We’ve had a few client sites that have automatically switched over to the archive page without giving us an opportunity to import the page builder layout. If your connect card page is looking off, please reach out to us so we can re-import the new layout. 🙂

A New Ministries Feature

As we continue to develop our teams feature into something you can full manage your ministry teams with, we are realizing that some churches need something a little more basic. They don’t think of their ministry teams as “teams” that are managed. They tend to simply focus on the ministries they offer. We just recently started rolling out a new ministries feature that allows a simple listing of ministries and an overview of each one, similar to a simple blog post.

Multiple Leaders for Small Groups

For a while, you’ve only been able to select a single leader for small groups. Now you can select as many as you’d like. Just make sure they are already entered into the system as people.

About Categories and Tags

As we have worked with each of you on your website, we’ve noticed a slight misstep that we took early on. We didn’t put enough thought into taxonomies on our platform. As a result, you’ve been able to assign categories and tags across almost every different type of content. As we have put some more thought into it, we realize that we need to be more strategic. Some content types (like a location, for instance), need to be available as a taxonomy for certain posts.

For example, if you have a campus event for one campus of a multisite church, you might need that event to be tagged just for that campus. So we’re beginning to make some changes to the categories and tags systems across the whole platform. We’ll approach it in a way that if you’ve used them in the past, they will still work for old content, but at some point, categories and tags may be removed from certain content types for adding new content. As always, if you run into any issues, just reach out to us via chat.

Sitemap Links in the Footer

We had some instances of footer sitemap links not working properly, so we fixed that. Sitemaps are just there to help search engines know what you have on your website, and they tend to know where to look to find them. But having them available in the footer helps a bit. 🙂

A New Server

We’ve built a new server for this instance on the latest stable release of the Ubuntu OS (Ubuntu-20-04-x64 for all your nerdy types). As a part of this new environment, we’re running a new version of WP-Ultimo, which is what enables us to provision new sites and copy templates, as well as offer different subscription packages.

New Approach to Analytics

Over the last year, we’ve seen more and more people talking about the poor privacy practices of Google Analytics. (Take a moment to Google it, lol, and you’ll see.) We used to track all traffic in our own Google Analytics account. It wasn’t something that we could easily grant access to you, so you would need to setup an additional tracking account to really be able to see your statistics.

We’ve moved away from Google Analytics to a more privacy-focused system from Fathom Analytics. Fathom is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, and PECR. They keep the most sensitive data anonymous while still delivering meaningful data about your website visitors. It loads faster than Google Analytics as well.

In addition to the privacy features they offer, there is also a publish dashboard you can view by going to https://stats.digitalchurch.app/yourdomain.church. Just replace the domain name at the end with your own domain. (You’ll see our demo site stats using the link above.)

Note: If you are still on our old platform, you may need to try https://stats.digitalchurch.website/yourdomain.church.

Updated Pricing

As a part of the new version of our platform, we are introducing new pricing. Our standard plan, which offers similar functionality to non-church competitors like wix and squarespace, is now $19 monthly. Over the last year, as a product of inflation, those services have also raised their pricing in a similar way. Our standard plan, which used to be $29 monthly, is now $39 monthly. It includes our new prayer requests feature that we are rolling out later this year. The new Premium plan now starts at $59 monthly.

If you’d like to have access to our previous pricing, simply mention something to us via chat, and we’ll discount your plan to match our previous pricing. 😉 This special offer will only be available through the end of 2023. (But once you get the discount, you won’t lose it as long as your account stays active.)

🤠 We’re Hiring!

We’re looking to connect to contractors who want to work in the creative space for churches. If you’re a designer, developer, or writer and you want to help churches thrive in online ministry, consider joining our team. You can view our current positions at https://digitalchurch.pro

January 31, 2022

It’s no secret that the church is made up of people. This includes attendees, ministry leaders, board members, and staff members. They all play an important role in the life of the church. And if your church website is really going to function as a digital representation of your local church, it should have the ability to represent these individuals.

All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it.

1 Corinthians 12:27 NLT

Let’s start by thinking about a staff page on your website. It’s easy for most of us to see why a church might need one. In fact, that’s often one of the most visited pages on a church website. If you put yourselves in the shoes of a new person, it’s easy to see why. You’re visiting a new church for the first time. You see multiple people step up on the platform, with no idea who any of them are, and you begin to feel a connection with those people. But it’s really hard to pull them aside to introduce yourself. You want to get to know them, though, so it’s nice to be able to have a bit of a head start. You go to the church website to see who they are and read a little bit about them. This scenario plays out week after week in thousands of churches.

Staff isn’t quite a broad enough designation, though. Often times, we have lay people serving in leadership roles. This could be as a board member, a ministry director, or even a classroom teacher. So rather than only having staff available on the site, I would encourage you to add everyone in a leadership position to your church website.

In response to that need, we developed a feature we called “Team Members”. Many of you have been using that feature for a while now, especially when it comes to assigning a speaker for a sermon.

But as I’ve personally dreamt about what the Digital Church Platform could become–about how it could help churches to thrive online–I realized that we needed to broaden the scope of “Team Members” to include any “People” in the church. This would allow us to do much more than we are currently able to do.

What kind of features can we develop on top of Digital Church People?

For starters, you might want to add a member directory to your website. Perhaps people with user accounts would have the capability to sign in to their website and view a directory of their fellow church members. Maybe they could even send them a message of encouragement or express their prayers for that person. Or maybe, just maybe, we could encourage people to complete a profile that includes some basic information on their own spiritual journey.

This is where things get interesting.

What if you had a database of people for your church that included important information like: Who has accepted Jesus? Who has been baptized? Who is serving on a team? Who regularly attends a small group? Who has submitted a prayer request?

As a church leader, that should give you some incredibly useful data to be able to know how to lead your church.

As we develop this new tool for churches, we will include the ability to define spiritual growth markers like salvation, baptism, prayer, etc. And as your church engages in spiritual development over time, we’ll display relevant data to those of you in leadership so you’ll be able to make informed decisions about how you are leading your church.

Privacy is important as well, so we will be moving forward with great caution. We want people to be able to track their own spiritual growth markers privately if they would like, while still presenting anonymized data for the church leadership, but also to allow some of that data to be shared in detail if the individual decides to share it.

Out of this vision, we’re opening a Digital Church People Beta Program today. It’s very simple right now, and really isn’t much different than our Team Member feature was, but it’s laying groundwork for amazing growth of our platform, and in turn giving you some tools that you will be able to use to lead your church into growth.

If you would like to join the Digital Church People Beta Program, you can fill out an application and our team will get you set up. We’re looking forward to receiving feedback directly from you as we shape the future of this essential tool for churches.

October 18, 2021

Sometimes, when you’re working on a long page, it can be a little overwhelming to process all the content on that page as you’re working on it. Moving entire rows up and down the page can be a little cumbersome as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to have access to a simple list view of the page contents and have the ability to move them around within that list view?

Now you can! In the top right corner of the page builder interface, you’ll now see an icon for the outline panel. You’ll see new options to add labels in the advanced tab for rows, columns, and modules as well to organize your layout. We’ll be working on adding those labels to our templates as well. From now on, restructuring your page content is as simple and dragging it up and down the list. (You can also duplicate and delete content from the outline view!)

Let us know how you like this new feature! We love to hear from you in the chat!

October 4, 2021

We’re constantly trying to find ways to help you save time. If you’re short-staffed (as most churches are), you might have found that it’s difficult to get your sermons published every week. Maybe getting them posted on YouTube is all you have time for.

We know that adding sermons to your website is vital. Here are a few reasons why:

1. People search for things they are struggling with spiritually. Your sermons might help them find the help they are looking for. Making sure you have sermons published on your website makes your website a resource for people who are searching for Jesus.
2. Sermons give your website more value to users. Regular worship experiences are one of the most critical things we do as churches. It’s incredibly valuable to your internal faith community, so why not make sure that when your people are on your website, they see the latest sermons right there, ready to be watched (or re-watched or shared)?
3. More content gives your website more value to search engines. Aside from the actual content that people search for, when search engines see that you are publishing content regularly, that can contribute to a higher level of credibility within their algorithm. That means that you have a better chance of being found for unrelated searches, (like “churches near me”) which gives your church greater visibility overall.
4. It makes your website more interactive and sharable. People like to share things they find as valuable online. You spend so much time writing your sermons, so you should do everything you can to leverage their value. Create a culture among your people of sharing sermons from your church website. Then, when the friends they are sharing with are ready to come to an event or plan a visit for a Sunday, everything they need is already available in a place they are familiar with: your church website.

Those are just a few simple reasons why sermon publishing is so important to the content strategy of your church website. But like we said earlier, who has time for that?

We decided that for some of you, it might be nice if you could just set up an automatic connection to your YouTube channel. Something that made it so every time you published a new video on your channel, it showed up as a sermon on your website. We decided it was time to build it into our new sermon plugin.

🎉 We’re proud to announce that all new sites are now able to automatically publish sermons from their YouTube channel!

To achieve that, we had to build a new sermon plugin for our system that included the new code. That new sermon code also affects the Live Stream settings, so we can’t just force activate it on everyone’s website (without messing up some other stuff). All new sites have this new feature by default! But if you started building your site before today (October 4th, 2021), then you’ll need to reach out to us via chat, so we can manually activate this feature on your website and make sure your Live Stream is still functioning properly.

Keep an eye out for some help guides that will hit our Support Center soon that will explain how to set this up for your website as well.

March 1, 2021

We just pushed some updates to the admin menu styles. Functionally, not much has changed, but the colors provide a better contrast than before, which we hope will make it easier for you to quickly find what you’re looking for in the admin dashboard. You’ll notice that the + New button stands out a bit more than it used to in the dashboard, and you’ll also notice that the submenus have a beautiful background blur applied to them.

Collapse that menu!

If you look closely, you’ll see a small icon in the top left corner of the new admin menu. Click on that and the whole menu will collapse out of the way. Hooray!

Well, what do you think? Jump into the chat and let us know!

P.S. If you missed last week’s post about the block editor, you’ll want to make sure you read it. It made some huge improvements to how you can manage content on dynamic items like blog posts and sermons.

February 24, 2021

The Digital Church Platform is a custom built application that uses a combination of proprietary code and open source tools to give you the best experience we can. Our administration area and content management system is built on WordPress, which is an open-source application that powers 40% of the internet. Because of the vast ecosystem of plugins and raw code available to us, we’ve been able to do almost anything with WordPress.

At the end of 2018, WordPress released their new Block Editor as part of the Gutenberg project. It introduced a cleaner, more powerful way to edit basic website content using content blocks and a simple interface that resembles Dropbox Paper or Notion. At the time of the release, we decided to give the block editor some time to mature before we began implementing it directly into The Digital Church Platform. We believe the time has come to bring the Block Editor to the Digital Church experience.

Last week, we pushed an update that activated the Block Editor for several content types. You will now see the Block Editor active for blog posts, connect cards, resources, sermons, stories, and teams. You’ll notice all the same options are still available, although the interface looks a little bit different. If you have any trouble finding something, you can always reach out to us via chat and we’ll get you headed in the right direction.

What is a block?

A “block” is simply a way to describe a piece of content. There are several block types available for you to use, including quotes, headings, buttons, images, galleries, and embeds. As we continue to develop the Digital Church Platform, we’ll extend the Block Editor with more blocks and patterns. (Patterns are just collections of pre-styled blocks that are meant to give you a bit of a template to work from.

What about the Page Builder?

Don’t worry. We don’t have any plans to get rid of the Page Builder. The Page Builder gives you full control of static pages and allows you to fully customize the entire layout. The Block Editor is a little different. It’s meant to work with more dynamic content types like sermons, connect cards, and blog posts. These content types live within our theme layouts, so you wouldn’t use the Block Editor to design the whole post, just the main content area of the post.

How do I add a content block?

Adding blocks is very easy. Similar to the Page Builder, you’ll see a plus button in the top menu where you can add a new block. While the page builder uses drag-and-drop, the Block Editor just adds the block to wherever your cursor is active. It’s much more linear in the way you compile the blocks as you work down the post. There’s also another really fast way to add a new block… slash commands.

What’s a slash command?

Slash commands are a quick way to add a new block without taking your hands off the keyboard. For instance, when writing this post, I used text with heading blocks between sections. Instead of reaching for my trackpad, I just used a slash command by starting a new line and typing /heading on the new line.

How can I test it out?

A great way to test out the new Block Editor is to open your Digital Church Platform dashboard and create a new Blog Post. Feel free to click around on all the buttons and try out some blocks. Don’t forget to try out a slash command!

How do I get back to my dashboard?

When you are all done in the Block Editor, just tap on the button in the top left (where the Digital Church logo is) and you’ll return to the familiarity of the dashboard.

March 17, 2020

Because of the current Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, live streaming has moved from side-stage to center stage. Many churches are closing their doors for the next several weeks (or months) and scrambling to either start live streaming or bring things to the next level. For years, many churches viewed live streaming as a way to help the few who couldn’t make it to the live worship experience (or maybe to extend their reach beyond their walls a bit), but for now, it’s the primary way churches will communicate their sermons and information for the foreseeable future.

We’re all in this together, and Digital Church is doing everything we can to develop tools for our churches to be able to reach their people in this digital-only landscape. The first step was to finish up a live streaming integration we’ve been working on for several months. If you log into the dashboard on your Digital Church website, you should see a live stream widget right in the first page of the admin area. You can also visit the live streaming settings by going to Settings > Sermons in the dashboard.

Once you’re on the site settings page, you’ll see three options: Facebook, YouTube, and iFrame. Any dedicated streaming platform should provide you with an iframe code that you can use to embed their stream on your website. YouTube and Facebook work a little differently, though, so we’ve built specific integrations to help you get the most out of these two free-to-stream platforms.

Facebook Live

Facebook seems to be the first place churches consider streaming. The engagement you can find natively on facebook is incredible. You’ll have access to a commenting and reaction framework that integrates nicely within facebook, and people can easily share the stream with their friends to help you broaden the impact of the live stream and get the Gospel out to more people.

There’s one BIG caveat, though. Facebook generates a unique video URL for each video and doesn’t give you any way to automatically access every “latest or current video” in an embed. So we created a workaround for you on our platform. As soon as you schedule or start a new live stream, the unique live video URL will be available. All you need to do is copy and paste the updated video URL in your dashboard live stream settings page and BOOM. Your whole site is now updated with the latest stream. No digging through embed codes. No “embed generators” to deal with. Just copy and paste the video link.

Once your stream is set up, you can add a livestream anywhere on your site with a simple

shortcode.

YouTube Live

YouTube goes one step further toward a full-fledged live streaming platform. If you set up your channel and go through the live streaming approval process (which can take a day or two), you’ll be able to access your current or latest live video with a channel ID. Just get your channel ID from your YouTube channel settings and paste it into your Digital Church website live stream settings page. Save the changes and you’re feed will always display your latest or current live video.

Just add the

shortcode to any page of your site and you’re set!

Third-Party Live Streaming Platforms

Every other live streaming platform we’ve found gives you access to an iframe embed code that you can copy and paste into your Digital Church website live streaming settings page to set your site to use that stream. Anywhere on the site where you add the

shortcode, your stream will appear.

One More Thing…

Just integrating the feed wasn’t enough for us! We wanted to give you a simple countdown timer that can be placed anywhere on your site. The timer counts down to your “on-air” time. Once that time arrives, the timer turns into a “Live” notice. When your “off-air” time comes around, the countdown comes back and starts counting down to next week. You can add your timer anywhere on your site with a simple

LIVE

shortcode.

We also baked in a really cool feature to the live timer… Let’s say you want to only show the livestream when you’re on-air, and when you aren’t on-air, you want to display the sermon archive posts. Well, as long as the timer is active on the page, it will fire some extra script that can hide or show some additional content. Any element you want to show during your on-air window just needs to have a class of “on-air”. Likewise, anything you want to hide while you’re on-air (and show while you’re off-air) you can give the “off-air” class. (Look in the advanced tab of the page builder and you’ll find a field for class. You can only do this to one element on the page, so be strategic. You may need to set up two entire rows to include everything you want to change.)

Also, we’ve integrated the new live stream features into our Live page template in the page builder, so if you don’t have a dedicated live streaming page on your website, just import that page template and you’ll be all set!

As always, reach out to us via chat if you need any help!