Igniter Media Group
a resource in Creative | Design | Featured | Media | Tech
Igniter Media provides some brilliant media including standalone videos, backgrounds (video and static), bumbers and Worship video tracks (worship songs put to videos ready to watch/sing to/reflect on).
All the resources are pay for. You can either pay for individual items or buy ‘packs’ (dvds) of resources.
On a personal note, I love Igniter’s stuff and we’ve used it in my Church!
Added 25th October 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
SermonVideos.com
a resource in Creative | Media | Tech | Worship
SermonVideos.com is a worship media site with lots of great quality (pay for) video downloads.
It works on a credit system. The more credits you purchase (at one time,) the more free credits you get. Credits are held in your account for later use.
Or you can purchase an ‘all you can download’ annual subscription.
Added 25th October 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
Vine Resources
a resource in Creative | Media | Tech | Youth
VineResources.com is a collection of resources, links, and other materials produced mainly for the student and college/young adult ministries at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY.
There’s a great range of (free) downloads that can help your youth series and events.
They include background images and video loops. Most of the videos are in HD.
Added 22nd September 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
RedFerrisWheel Worship Backgrounds
a resource in Creative | 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/
Added 22nd August 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
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!
Added 22nd August 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
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
Added 28th July 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
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!
Added 17th July 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
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/
Added 17th July 2008 | No Comments Yet | Permalink | Trackback
Sermon Browser
a resource in Sermons | Site Builders | Tech
Sermon Browser is a plugin for the popular blog/cms software Wordpress.
This great little plugin allows the easy addition of sermons (audio, video and text) and podcasting to your wordpress installation.
For the audio, you can either upload mp3 files via the plugin or you can link to a file/embed on another server/hosting such as Amazon S3 or Odeo.
For video you can link to a video on site such as YouTube or Google Video.
You can add the times of services and speakers, etc. to make the adding of sermons very simple. There are also customisable templates for how the sermons are displayed on the site.
http://www.4-14.org.uk/sermon-browser
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