Living Open Source

A WordPress Theme for Churches? - ALPHA

Apr 5th, 2006 by Tim 46

Why A Church Theme?

Word Press is not just a blogging platform. It lowers the “geek barrier” for those wanting to run web sites. Church websites are a prime example. An ‘expert’ turns up, designs a website and as time goes by, it becomes outdated, looks no better than that old wooden noticeboard outside the door of the church and no one comes to visit! Sounds familiar? Well I think WP is the ideal solution. Its Admin interface is far simpler than most other CMS tools I’ve looked at, which means Mrs Smith in the church office can keep it up to date (well almost!). And so here is my first WP Theme which is designed specifically with a Church application in mind.
alpha

Features

Support for RSS Events
Cool drop-down hierarchical menu for Pages (cross-browser too!)
And - produces valid XHTML and CSS!
Support for my own Plogger Press plugin
etc. etc

It is just so cool! Very grateful to the article at htmldog for the CSS drop down menus.

Download it.

Simply download and unzip to your theme directory in wordpress. Activate it in your control panel and enjoy…

Download Latest Version

Oh, and if you use it let us know where it is being used.

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46 Comments on the Comment Wall

1 On April 18th, 2006 at 7:51 pm Dan said:

I just setup http://www.vincentumc.com and http://www.stmarksminot.com with your Alpha theme.

I just wanted to let you know it is working great and that I appreciate the work you put into this as well as the plogger plug-in.
2 On April 24th, 2006 at 7:08 am tim said:

2 great church sites. Exactly the application I had in mind for this theme.
3 On April 24th, 2006 at 7:10 am tim said:

Also now being used at http://www.brownleygreenbaptist.org.uk
4 On April 25th, 2006 at 1:38 am bob forbes said:

Great Theme style!! Am currently playing around with it for our Church website at: http://www.ChurchOfAscension.net

Many Thanks… so far this theme is the best Church theme I have come across…really appreciate your efforts, as well as your kindness in opening the theme up to other! Many thanks!.
5 On June 4th, 2006 at 2:06 pm Weblog Tools Collection » WP Theme: ALPHA for Churches said:

[...] WP Theme: ALPHA for Churches The original intent of the theme author was to provide an easy to update and dynamic platform for churches to keep their patrons up to date. Here is an example. Technorati Tags: alpha for churches wordpress theme Related Posts from the Past: [...]
6 On June 4th, 2006 at 5:52 pm Aaron Brazell said:

Thinking about using this for Community Gospel Church’s site. One thing I notice though from Bob’s church in the comment above - the nav doesn;t scale well with longer menu items. Might fix that for a bugfix release.
7 On June 5th, 2006 at 7:34 pm NoHandleBars said:

Sorry in advance for the “stupid” question, but where do I change it so that each page is “centered” in the browser rather than always left-justified. Thanks for the great work on this theme!
8 On June 10th, 2006 at 1:34 pm WRPF Developers’ Blog » WP theme for Churches said:

[...] Went blog surfing in the midst of my preparations for my exams again. I can’t help but feel excited about how CMS can be used to run church websites. It’s just so interesting and it’s great to see how this can become a medium and platform to reach out to more people. I came across this entry A Wordpress Theme for Churches?- ALPHA and I applaud the author’s efforts in bringing wordpress to churches all around the world. Let me quote? the author on why he developed a church theme: Word Press is not just a blogging platform. It lowers the “geek barrier” for those wanting to run web sites. Church websites are a prime example. An ‘expert’ turns up, designs a website and as time goes by, it becomes outdated, looks no better than that old wooden noticeboard outside the door of the church and no one comes to visit! Sounds familiar? Well I think WP is the ideal solution. Its Admin interface is far simpler than most other CMS tools I’ve looked at, which means Mrs Smith in the church office can keep it up to date (well almost!). And so here is my first WP Theme which is designed specifically with a Church application in mind. [...]
9 On July 13th, 2006 at 4:34 am Stephen Munday said:

Just posted about your theme. It would be great if there were a few themes like this in Japanese for churches here to use. (I am in Japan, where the Internet is big and the Christian population is small…)
10 On July 13th, 2006 at 4:58 am Rank Him Higher » WordPress Theme For Churches said:

[...] I came across this while I was in Korea for the GCIA (Global Christian Internet Alliance) conference last month. I was there as a guest and an adviser to Alpha Japan. Now, although Japan is one of the most connected countries in the world, the Christian community is very small and resource poor. This goes someway to explain circa 1996-style church websites. But with tools like Wordpress and themes like this one, there is really no need for this to be the case. I’m sure it would be easy to translate this skin into Japanese or for a Japanese designer to come up with something similar and all these churches could have great-looking, easy-to-maintain websites. [...]
11 On August 17th, 2006 at 5:52 am Church website and blog ideas » Choosing a theme said:

[...] It is clear from looking at the default theme that it will not be suitable and will not meet the needs that were set out. However, searching for church themes, brings one website up again and again. LivingOS is the blog of a minister called Tim Hyde in St Helens on Merseyside. He is produced several themes for churches including LivingOS alpha. It has a large space on the right for permanent information about the church and he has sucessfully incorporated an accessible drop down menu. [...]
12 On November 16th, 2006 at 3:32 pm Aubrey Zhang said:

I use your theme for our Chinese congregation but do not know how to adjust the text width in the top menu. Here is the address:

http://agape-love.org/update

As you see the menu can allow me to display only three Chinese characters.

Your help on this is greatly appreciated. God bless!
13 On December 23rd, 2006 at 10:13 pm Andy said:

I’m trying to work out the css menu’s too - my text doesn’t fit in the first menu and disappears - I can send you a demo link if you have any ideas?
14 On December 24th, 2006 at 8:21 am tim said:

The width of the menus is fixed in the CSS file. If page name is too long it won’t fit. You can try adjusting the width in the CSS. Look at the #nav tags. It isn’t as simple as changing one value though. You just need to tweek teh various width settings and see.
15 On January 14th, 2007 at 10:30 pm Dave said:

Hi Tim, I’ve been experimenting with several of your templates, but have finally gone for this one for the website for the Parish of Langdon Hills. Thanks for all the work that has gone into them all - I’ll point some people your way from my blog when I get around to a church website post I’ve been working on for goodness knows how long.
16 On January 25th, 2007 at 4:12 pm Jonathan said:

Hi Tim,

I’m working with Andy in updating our Church website with your Alpha theme. I have some more info that may help if finding an answer to our problem.

It seems that when a title is too long and wraps to the second line the box isn’t expanding and there is some overlap. This prolem has occurred in Firefox and IE7, but everything seems to work fine with IE6. Have you run into this problem before or do you have somewhere to point me to for a solution.

Thanks
Jonathan
17 On January 25th, 2007 at 4:16 pm Jonathan said:

I’m sorry my previous comment was related to the drop down menus that Andy mentioned 3 comments previous to mine.
18 On January 25th, 2007 at 4:28 pm NoHandleBars said:

I’d be curious to know if anyone has upgraded to WP 2.1 with this theme and what, if any, issues were encountered.
19 On January 25th, 2007 at 5:20 pm tim said:

I’m afraid there is no easy solution. You can play with the size of the menus in the CSS file. But there is no way to automatically scale to your page titles. I would suggest modifying the CSS to settle on a max size and then keep all your page titles to that length.

Long page titles don’t look pretty anyway in the menu, even you did wrap them.
20 On January 25th, 2007 at 5:23 pm tim said:

I have tried upgrading to 2.1 on a couple of test blogs and it just doesn’t work at present even with the default themes. The issues I have had are more to do with the dashboard features. Safer to wait a week or so before upgrading to 2.1 on any live sites.
21 On January 25th, 2007 at 6:00 pm NoHandleBars said:

Thanks, Tim!

I just tried updating this theme on a local test copy of the blog and everything worked for me except RS-Event. I’ve left a message on that plug-in author’s site. No events show at all. All other areas seem to be working fine, including the menu, links, and admin interface. But bear in mind I made very few and very minor changes to the theme.

I’ll definitely wait until doing the live upgrade until the issue with RS-Event is resolved since that’s crucial to my site. Thanks again.
22 On January 25th, 2007 at 6:50 pm tim said:

Actually the theme and the RS Event plugin work fine on my WP 2.1 test blog. The only issue with 2.1 I have relates to the visual editor in the dashboard.
23 On January 25th, 2007 at 7:45 pm NoHandleBars said:

Here’s the result of further testing on 2.1:

Short Story: RS Event 0.9.3 appears to work as designed with this theme and WP 2.1.

Long Story: With RS Event 0.6.3 and WP 2.x I could future post with an event. Although the post would not publish until that future date, RS Event would show the event anyway in the mean time. This was very convenient for pre-entering a series of events in advance of their actually being published, such as a weekly Bible reading schedule.

I’m leaving another message regarding this on the RS Event author’s site. But otherwise I’m having zero problems. I’ve seen on the WP support site that many are having difficulty with the WYSIWYG editor…wish I knew why I’m not…Thanks!
24 On February 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm NoHandleBars said:

The RS Event plugin appears to be abandoned. It’s been months since its author has responded to any of the dozens of messages left on his site in his own “support” forum. I would be very interested if you have suggestions for alternative plugins for that functionality and whether or not you might be considering changing your themes to use them? Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks.
25 On February 4th, 2007 at 8:43 am tim said:

Well, I don’t always answer messages myself either. The RS Plugin works, though if there are tweaks that need doing, share them on the WordPress forums and some kind person might come up with a new version of the plugin.

But actually I think the author may be intending to renew his interest again anyway. Read his latest post.
26 On March 5th, 2007 at 12:39 am NoHandleBars said:

I’ve taken the plunge and updated to 2.1.2. (I’ve addressed the above issues by writing TWO posts, one in the past so RS-Event will show the event in the sidebar in advance, and one in the future to be published a week before the event occurs.) However, I just noticed that there is no “previous page” showing either on the main page nor in the admin section for posts. Even if I select a search it stops at the limit of the page and doesn’t allow me to see the rest. You can see this on the site. Any help/hints would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
27 On March 5th, 2007 at 11:39 am tim said:

If you have modified any of the template files, check that your still have the lines of code at the bottom of each page that display the previous and next links.

Something like:
<div class="navigation"> <div class=”alignleft”><?php next_posts_link(’« Previous Entries’) ?></div> <div class=”alignright”><?php previous_posts_link(’Next Entries »’) ?></div> </div>

This theme is working well on other sites with 2.1.2, so if you haven’t lost these lines of code then are there any plugins/options affecting this behaviour.
28 On March 6th, 2007 at 2:35 pm NoHandleBars said:

You Da Man! It was a conflict from the Adhesive plugin. I switched to the WP-Sticky plugin and everything’s back to normal. Thanks!
29 On March 8th, 2007 at 2:41 pm Richard Thomas said:

Thanks for these themes. I’ve made some alterations for the above sight and when I upgrades to 2.1 the sidebar dissappears. Is it my fault?

Richard
30 On March 8th, 2007 at 5:54 pm Tim said:

I have it running on 2.1.2 and the sidebar is OK! Your alterations may have introduced some problem. Might just be as simple as a missing end tag or something. Where do you have it running?
31 On March 9th, 2007 at 3:24 pm Richard Thomas said:

I have it running on 2.1.2 too.
32 On March 9th, 2007 at 4:48 pm Richard Thomas said:

Sorry to be a pain but it doesn’t now when I upload the original theme!!
33 On March 10th, 2007 at 9:39 am Tim said:

Do you have a url where I might see this? What browser and version are you running? Have you tried the default theme that comes with WP? What then?
34 On March 11th, 2007 at 1:59 am Richard Thomas said:

http://www.hillsidewimbledon.org
Tried it on Firefox and IE7 and the default theme seems fine.

RT
35 On March 11th, 2007 at 8:31 am Tim said:

I think I know what the problem may be.

Are you using a plugin to keep a page as your static home page?

In the Alpha theme, there is no sidebar on single pages (page.php). The sidebar only shows up on the index page.

Your site seems to be showing a widecolumn page as the home page which suggests you are using some kind of plugin to replace the index with a different, static home page.

Just a guess?
36 On March 15th, 2007 at 11:32 pm Richard Thomas said:

Thanks - I was using the new feature on static page option on 2.1 but I’ve moved things around a little. You are really benefitting a lot of people with these themes.
37 On July 12th, 2007 at 12:23 pm Free WordPress Themes said:

[...] ALPHA for Churches [...]
38 On July 18th, 2007 at 12:14 am Cindi said:

I am new to this…..but I cannot find the login link on your upsilon theme……What am I missing? I can’t seem to figure out a way to login to make the changes that I need to make. Sorry… I feel like I am missing something very obvious…..
39 On July 18th, 2007 at 7:07 am Tim said:

Yes it is missing by design. But you can add it again if you use the sidebar widgets in WP. To get to your login page got to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/
40 On July 18th, 2007 at 8:52 am Cindi said:

THANKS! I knew it had to be something so simple!
41 On August 1st, 2007 at 6:37 am TIPS FOR BLOGGING Wordpress Templates-1.5 and 2 and free « said:

[...] ALPHA for Churches [...]
42 On September 25th, 2007 at 5:15 pm NoHandleBars said:

With the arrival of WP 2.3, and the fact that the RS Event plugin is not compatible, and that by all appearances on the RS Event author’s own support forum that the plugin was abandoned a long time ago, I’m curious if this theme is going to be updated with an alternate plugin? Or is there an alternate plugin that others can suggest along with the appropriate modifications to make everything work with WP 2.3? Thanks in advance.
43 On September 25th, 2007 at 6:29 pm Tim said:

Well it seems to work in 2.1 and 2.2. Not got round to testing it in 2.3. But yes I need to find an alternative, if the author has abandoned it.
44 On October 8th, 2007 at 4:08 pm bill said:

So is this theme not a good choice if you want to have a static index page? Would one normally achieve that with a plug-in?

I want to refresh our church website and incorporate a page with “news” posts and pictures of some of our events. but I don’t think I want that to be the front page.
45 On October 8th, 2007 at 5:10 pm Tim said:

Should be OK. WP 2.2/3 has a static page option now. No plugins needed.
46 On October 18th, 2007 at 11:36 pm Mike Irwin said:

I just set up my church’s website using this theme. I had a few small problems, but they were mostly because of my wanting to change a few things. Check it out at http://www.TabernacleBC4U.com.

If anyone knows what to change in the CSS or wherever to change the width of the grey area of the right sidebar, I would appreciate knowing. I messed around with various things and never got it to change.