RedFerrisWheel Worship Backgrounds
a resource in Design | Media | Tech | Worship
redferriswheel is the site of Zach Fonville. Zach’s created over 150 great free worship backgrounds that you can download for use in your Church; and more are added regularly.
There’s a great selection in a variety of styles and themes. We use some of them at my Church!
http://feeds.feedburner.com/zachfonville
Church Community Builder
a resource in Church Tools | Tech
Church Community Builder is an online Church manangement system. You can manage the Church membership, groups, calendars and giving. Training is also provided.
http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/
Sermon Connect
a resource in Church Tools | Media | Sermons | Tech
Sermon Connect is an online feature packed application that allows you to publish audio, video (with unlimited storage) and blogs. You can also use it for email list and membership management.
It’s not the cheapest out there, but you get a lot of features for your money!
Planning Centre Online
a resource in Church Tools | Tech | Worship
Planning Centre is an online application that allows you and your Church staff/members to easily collaborate and plan services.
It’s fully customisable allowing you to order songs, readings and other service elements all in one place. And it can even create CCLI usage reports based on your service plans!
http://www.planningcenteronline.com
TheWorshipCommunity.com
a resource in Blogs & Happenings | Media | Worship
TheWorshipCommunity.Com is a grass-roots community of worship leaders, artists, singers, musicians, and technicians from all over the world.
There are great articles on all aspects of worship, leading, music & tech and a forum where you can question, learn and share about all things worship!
The articles are written by ‘real people’ to lead and do ‘real worship’.
http://www.theworshipcommunity.com
http://www.theworshipcommunity.com/feed/rss
Damaris
a resource in Children | Media | Mission & Outreach
Damaris is a UK based educational charity with a Christian foundation and works with people of all faiths and none. They operate in three departments, Churches, Schools and Media.
There are some great resources made by Damaris including Tools for Talks, RE Lessons & School Assemblies and Podcasts. They’ve also got some great resources for churches and schools based on Chronicles of Narnia.
http://www.damaris.org/cm/rss.php?type=44
DIY Podcasting on Wordpress
a resource in How-tos | Sermons | Tech
We use wordpress to run my Church’s site including the sermon podcast, and being the geek that I am (!) I set it up myself.
I could have used a plugin such as PodPress or Sermon Browser, but I decided to do my own thing! So I thought I’d share how I did it. It’s a bit geeky, but rather nice!
It uses a few Wordpress plugins, some javascript and some custom Wordpress templates!
First of all I use a category called ‘Sermons’ and every sermon is a new post within that Category. I then use Category Templates to change the way that the Sermons cat looks, so I can have an audio player, etc. of the posts just for that cat.
If you’ve not come across Category Templates before, they can be very useful. You can custom design and name template files so category/archive indexes and single posts within that category are then used by WP automatically.
For category/archive indexes the template files are named like category-X.php (X being the ID of the category).
For single posts within a category it’s single-cat-X.php . (You need the ‘Post Templates by Category‘ plugin to get it to work for single posts.)
So that way I can have the category index and single posts for sermons looking just how I want them!
The main plugin used is called ‘Get Custom Field Values‘ and it allows you to put information in Wordpress ‘Custom Fields‘ into posts/category archives.
When adding a new sermon, I use a ‘custom field’ called ‘enclosure’ and enter the url of where I’ve uploaded the MP3 file.
So in my template files (both custom category index and single) I use the custom field twice and have:
<ul>
<li class=”player”><a class=”media” href=”<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’enclosure’); ?>”>Listen to the Sermon</a></li>
<li class=”download”><a href=”<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’enclosure’); ?>”>Download the Sermon (mp3)</a></li>
</ul>
So it looks like it’s just going to put display the link to the sermon MP3 file twice, but it doesn’t! Because the top one displays an online player.
For the online player I’ve used the excellent jQuery Media Plugin to do all the player embedding and coding for me. It’s having the class of ‘media’ on the link which kicks the media player into action! (jQuery, is a javascript library that can make doing nifty things with javascript much simpler!)
If you want to display the date archives in a list in the sidebar, but only want to show them for a certain category (which makes sense in this case), the ‘Archives for a category‘ plugin is excellent.
I can then take the feed for just the sermons cat (in my case it’s http://www.minehead-baptist.com/category/sermons/feed) and run that through the wonderful FeedBurner to burn the podcast feed. It them becomes the feed for the sermons & podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MBCSermons
On my site you’ll notice that the date archives in the sidebar and ‘How to listen’ sections are toggled/faded up and down by clicking on the relevant link. This is also done using jQuery. As I’m already loading the jQuery library to make the media player work, I can also use it to do the toggles!
The html for the toggles and links is:
<p><a href=”#divtotoggle” class=”toggle”>Link to Click</a></p>
<div id=”divtotoggle” class=”toggle”>
<p>The additional information to show goes in here</p>
</div>
And the javascript (best placed in a seperate .js file linked in the <head> section) is:
$(document).ready(function(){
// hide all reveals
$(’div.toggle, li.toggle’).hide();// toggle reveals
$(’a.toggle’).toggle(function(){
var toggle = $(this).parent().next(’div.toggle, li.toggle’);
toggle.fadeIn();
}, function(){
$(this).parent().next().fadeOut();
});});
This looks for links with the class of ‘toggle’ and toggles the next <div> or <li> it finds that also has a class of toggle.
I hope that’s not too confusing!
I know it sounds complex, but it isn’t really and I can add a new podcast post in about a minute!
If you’ve got any questions, please let a comment!
Using Wordpress for Church Sites
a resource in How-tos | Site Builders | Tech
The great guys over at Church Communications Pro have a great series of posts on how you can effectivly use Wordpress to run a Church site.
Although some of the information is a little out of date (due to new versions of Wordpress), it’s still well worth a read and covers most of what you’ll need to know!
They also run a sister site with many good Wordpress theme - ithemes.
http://www.churchcommunicationspro.com/using-wordpress-to-run-church-websites-tutorial-series/
TED
a resource in Leadership | Useful Stuff
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference that brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
There’s a great archive of the talks on the site from a wide variety of people, including Billy Graham! You can download many of the talks (as mp4 movie files).
Control Arms
a resource in Make a Difference
Control Arms is joint venture by Amnesty International, Oxfam and IANSA as they are campagining for a global, legally binding agreement – an Arms Trade Treaty to control the unregulated global arms trade.
You can find out more about the campaign and join the Million Faces Petition.