Simple Non-Profit WordPress Theme
Published in WordPress ThemesWith this free WordPress theme any non-profit organization can have an effective website. It includes features to showcase your programs and events, and several elements are easily customizable. Organizations with limited budgets can present a professional image with this WordPress theme.
Theme features include:
- 7 color schemes from which to choose (screenshots of each are shown lower on this page)
- Customizable homepage slider
- Events calendar
- Organization news publication
- Upload your logo, or just use the site name in text
This WordPress theme was created with non-profit organizations in mind, including features that are needed by most organization websites. The homepage slider allows you to promote your programs and services, or attract attention to any initiative. Images in the slider can be linked to any page.
Most organizations have a lot of events going on, and with this theme you can have an effective event calendar. The homepage even displays 5 upcoming events for added exposure. When you set up the events you insert the date and time, and as it passes the event will be automatically removed from your site so you don’t have to remember to delete each event as it occurs.
The theme also includes a custom post type for news announcements, so you can publish press releases or other announcements and have them featured on your website. As with any WordPress-based site, blogging functionality is included. The theme’s home page template includes links to the most recent blog posts.
WordPress’s custom navigation menu feature is used for both the header and footer menus, so you have complete control over the links that are shown in your menus. The header menu supports drop downs.
From the WordPress dashboard you can enter links to your Facebook page and Twitter profile and the footer icons will be linked appropriately. If you don’t have social media profiles, simply leave the URL fields blank and no icons will be displayed.
Scroll down to see the alternate color schemes.
Documentation for the theme is available here.
View the theme demo | Download for free
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Alternate Color Schemes:
59 Responses
Wow…like always yo my no.1 design consultant.
Very nice color combination and text structure and I like the menu
Thanks so much Van…
I just used a theme for a non profit- Does this has ecommerce capability too?
What a great collection, I’ve been searching for a good-looking non-profit theme for a while. Many thanks for sharing this list
Saya,
There is no e-commerce capability built in to the theme, but there are plenty of WordPress plugins that will handle that. You could use WooCommerce (a free plugin) for e-commerce, or if you are just accepting donations, some organizations just use PayPal.
I have seen some theme’s advertise built in SEO optimization. Is there a true difference between those who do and don’t and if so, is such a feature built in to yours?
Hi Joshua,
SEO optimization can mean a lot of different things to different people. In general, our themes are built to be search engine friendly. Some premium themes that claim SEO features will allow you to edit title tags and meta tags. Our themes don’t do that, partly because there are a number of free plugins that allow you to do the same thing. Meta tags though are pretty useless these days. The title tag is the most important on-page factor. Still, SEO has more to do with off-page factors (like links from other sites) so I wouldn’t claim any theme to be SEO optimized because there is only so much influence a theme can have over a site’s overall SEO. A theme can help, and I think ours will, but it’s only part of the equation.
I’m trying out this theme and having some difficulty getting the News element to display. (I’d tried the stylish church theme first – and think this one might better suit my needs. I particularly like the three-column setup, and the events list!)
The front page container displays the list of news items okay, and so does the sidebar container on other pages, but when I click on a news item, I get a blank page with an H3 heading that says Blog.
I’ve re-read the tutorial and not found where I’ve gone wrong.
Aside from that, I’m thinking about some modifications or additions,
For example, I’m wondering what’s involved in turning one of the container / sections into a thumbnail gallery. I’d consider replacing the slideshow or news section with a thumbnail display that links to a gallery page.
I am also thinking about a Fundraising/Challenge page. It would be nice to have it replace the News section on the front page.
Any comments welcome!
Hi David,
I see what you are talking about for the news items. Can you email me your WordPress username and password so I can login and take a look at it from the WordPress dashboard? If so, you can send it to info@vandelaydesign.com. It looks like you made a change to the themes code to change the header to “News/Gallery”. Did you change any other code when you did that?
As far as the other customizations that you asked about, anything is possible if you are interested in editing the code of the theme files.
Steve,
I have changed lines in four of the templates: style.css, green.css, sidebar.php, & template-home.php
I made those changes *after* having had the difficulty with News posts.
I am wondering if there may be some residuals of the Sylish Church them, as the Nonprofit theme uses much the same setup.
I had installed the Stylish theme, played with it a bit, then decided to go for the Nonprofit theme to make use of the frontpage Blog container.
Ergo, I’ve installed the Nonprofit theme over the Stylish theme.
The changes I’ve made are
1. to remove the address display block in the footer – because I want a live link to OpenStreetMap instead – much like the top line on the Stylish theme (change in template-home.php) (see more about this below)
2. Change the colour and weight of the top menu text (changes in green.css)
3. Rename the Latest News heading to News/Gallery in the right-hand portion of the slideshow container, the sidebar widget, and on the ‘news’ page.
(changes in type-news.php, sidebar.php, template-home.php)
4. Change the font from Copse to Tahoma, throughout (style.css)
I think that’s it.
PS, I should point out that the top and bottom menus sort pages alphabetically unless each page is ranked before saving.
Your tutorial skips that step in describing how to create and save the pages.
The Stylish Church directions link can be manipulated to use OpenStreetMap.
I did it by changing line 193 in the Stylish header.php to read
Having done that, I put mlat=52.4408&mlon=-1.8988&zoom=17 in the address field under Theme Common Options.
With the Nonprofit theme, I would remove the footer line, as it’s pretty meaningless as a line of text, and put something like this somewhere prominent, like the Events page.
David,
Is there a reason you chose the custom permalink structure that you are using? When I change it to “post name” in the permalink settings it fixes the issue and the news pages open with no problem. It looks like with that custom permalink setting that you are using there is some issue that prevents the news template from loading.
The documentation actually does cover the issue that you’re having with the navigation menu. Please click on “navigation menu” in the contents of the documentation PDF and see those instructions. From looking in your WP dashboard you haven’t haven’t assigned a menu to the header or footer. Once you do that you will have control over how the links are arranged.
Hi, thank you for sharing this wonderful theme.
I’m trying to use it for our church group.
One problem is that on Home page, ‘latest news’ widget doesn’t appear.
It appears on other pages.
I tried this with both of my local server & host server but they have the same problem.
Please help me!!!!
Hi Jennifer,
I’m sending you an email.
Hi there
Thanks for creating this template.
When I set a featured image for a post. It does not show on my blog where I assume it should appear next to its corresponding post.
Is this how this template is or is there a way to solve this issue?
Please help
Thank you
Hi Youssef,
The featured image for posts doesn’t have any impact on this theme. If you want to use an image in a blog post you can just insert it into the post content. If you want an image to be used on the blog front page you can use a custom excerpt.
Hi Steven
Thanks for your reply.
I have another question, How can I change the white background colour of the them to a different colour?
Thanks
Hi Youssef,
You would have to edit the background color in the style.css file.
Hi Steven
I tried to figure out where in the style.css file but no success
Can you help please
Much Appreciated
Youssef,
Look for this code
background:#fff;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
color:#333;
}
Then change the background color.
Is there a way to put a calendar on the site? I have the code needed to “upload” the calendar, but I can’t figure out how to display it on one of the pages. Thanks for any help.
I’ve also read the pdf about this theme, but I can’t figure out how to get the slides to display. I’ve added a picture but they don’t seem to show up anywhere. In the settings I’ve clicked that I want a slideshow on my homepage. Thanks again. I’m slowly trying to learn WordPress. Your pdf has been very helpful so far.
Church Staff,
There is an event list in the theme, but it displays in list format and not in calendar format. You would have to add the code to one of the pages to change that.
Have you created the home page and set it to use the “Home” template? If you send me the URL and WordPress username and password I can login and take a look at it. Send it to info@vandelaydesign.com.
Hi Steven
Changing the color on the line you mentioned does not work.
Please check it
Thank you
Greetings,
I’m in the process of switching over to your excellent Non Profit theme. Our site is not live yet (but accessible at the URL above).
As I’m building, I’m having similar problems as those reported earlier, regarding News and Events entries pointing to an empty page with the title “Blog” in it.
Any insight you can offer, would be much appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your assistance, and cheers from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!
Paco
Paco,
I believe the issue is the permalink settings. If you set it to “post name” it should work. You can do that by going to Settings > Permalinks.
That did the trick! Thanks, Steven, for the quick reply and for an awesome theme!
Hi Steven
I changed the colour on the line you mentioned for the background but it does not work,
body {
background:#fff;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
color:#333;
}
Please help
Thank you
Another question if I may…
I’ve been tinkering with Contact Form 7 to set up a couple of forms on my website. I noticed that the styling of the forms were not what I had hoping, and, upon researching, realized that I would have to do some CSS tinkering within the plug-in.
I just created a password protected page at http://www.pvmenschorus.org/pvmc/members/ and realized that the styling for a text entry field and the “submit” button is also missing.
This makes me wonder if the style.css sheet for the theme has these type of fields considered at all. If not, I’ll have to dive into the world of CSS, something I’m somewhat dreading.
Any remark would be appreciated.
Cheers from Puerto Vallarta,
Paco Ojeda
Youssef,
What you can do is open the stylesheet of the color scheme that you are using (it would be styles/blue.css, of whatever color you are using. Then at the bottom of the stylesheet add a line to change the body background color to whatever you want.
Hi Paco,
It has been several years since I used Contact Form 7, so I can’t really say what the issue is, but sounds like it is some type of CSS conflict. You would have to check the CSS of the theme and the plugin (if the plugin has a css file, which I assume it does).
Will do, Steven.
Muchas gracias!
Paco
Steven,
First off, thank you so much for putting this up! I am amazed at this theme’s functionality and options, particularly for a non-profit.
The site I’m working on is new to me and I’m not sure what css work has been done on it in the past. I keep on having issues with the menu and was wondering if you had any kind of ideas as to what I need to change.
Thanks!
Hannah
Hi Hannah,
I’m not able to support customizations. From looking at the site there have definitely been some changes to the CSS. I try to provide support for getting the theme up and running as it is intended to work, but once a user makes customizations it would require a lot more time to figure out what has been changed and get it to work properly. Since it is a free theme I just can’t dedicate time to that. I would recommend that you have the person who made the CSS changes to get involved and get it working. You could also just download a fresh copy of the theme and replace the current theme with that version, and it should work as intended.
Hello,
Thanks for the theme, it looks very nicely done.
I’d just like to check though – I know it’s aimed at non-profits, but are we able to use it for other purposes (e.g. a business site)?
Keep up the good work,
Josh
Hi Josh,
You can use it for any type of website/business that you want. It has the Events functionality which is aimed at organizations, but it could be used for other purposes.
Hola Steven,
Sorry to knock on your door again regarding CSS. We needed to deploy our website ASAP, so we chose not to tinker with Contact Form 7 or similar plugins at this time.
We did, however create a password-protected page at http://www.pvmenschorus.org/pvmc/members/ and have removed all custom CSS styling from the theme.
Would you mind having a look at it? It seems odd to me that the password field is misplaced and the submit button doesn’t look styled…
I appreciate your feedback and thank you in advance for your time.
Paco Ojeda
Hi Paco,
I don’t have time to make any changes to the theme right now, but you can add some CSS for your password form to style it. The source code for the form from your page is:
<p>This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:</p>
<p><label for="pwbox-140">Password: <input name="post_password" id="pwbox-140" type="password" size="20" /></label> <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" /></p>
</form>
So you can style those form elements.
Hey Steven,
Absolutely LOVE this minimal, simple Non-Profit WordPress Theme! I’m having an issue though… I don’t understand what the problem is… I can NOT get the slide show to display… Is there anything you can help me out with here?! It would be greatly appreciated. I’m looking to redesign stlheroinhelp.com and want to use your theme! Of course full theme credit will go to you in the footer too
THANKS!
–Scott G.
Hi Scott,
You haven’t created the home page and set it to use the home template. This is covered towards the beginning of the documentation.
I love this theme, but can’t get the first blog post to appear on the Blog page. (I followed instructions on setting up the Blog page, and selected the Blog page for Posts in the Reading section.)
It appears there’s no Blog template file, whereas the Events and News pages have their own templates, and their daughter pages are filed in the /events/ or /news/ subdirectories. The published blog post has a URL that is in the root of the blog, not in a “/blog/” subdirectory. Is this what’s causing my problem?
In my third paragraph above, I meant to write:
“The published blog post has a URL that is in the root of the *website* (http://site.com/blog-post-title/), not in a “/blog/” subdirectory.”
Hi Don,
It looks like 2 blog pages have been created. When I click on the Blog link in the navigation menu it leads me to http://princeedwardgop.org/blog-2/, which has the problem that you are asking about. But if I go to http://princeedwardgop.org/blog/ the blog post shows up as it should. So it looks to me like 2 different pages have been created for the blog and the navigation menu is linking to the wrong one. If you change the menu to link to http://princeedwardgop.org/blog/ and delete http://princeedwardgop.org/blog-2/ it should be fine.
Okay, I solved my own problem – it turned out there was a trashed-but-not-deleted duplicate Blog page, with a different URL. When I saw that and deleted all trashed pages, the blog post appeared on the desired Blog page.
Steven,
Hello again! I got the menu issue fixed from my previous inquiry, but it seems that some people using Internet Explorer are having issues with the header.
When I look at it on IE 8 and 9 at the office, it looks fine. However, someone on the board of the non-profit I’m working for keeps sending me screenshots that look like this (he’s using IE 7 and IE 9):
http://www.harmonyhopeandhealing.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/HHHScreenshot.jpeg
Do you know of any coding/helpful websites that address this issue?
Thank you!
Hannah
Hi Hannah,
The problem is being caused by the size of your logo. From the theme documentation:
“The logo file should be no larger than 700 pixels wide and 100 pixels high. Larger sizes will cause issues with the layout.”
From my testing in Adobe BrowserLab I am seeing the issue in IE7 (IE8 and IE9 seem to be ok in BrowserLab). But when I test a site using the theme with a logo of the dimensions listed in the documentation there is no problem in IE7.
If you want to use the larger logo and not have issues in IE7 you would need to edit the CSS to increase the height of the header and logo.
Hello Steve,
I installed the theme in our (soon to be) church website, I created some dummy post on events & news but when I clicked on the links, it’s not showing the post, instead a page with word “blog” is appearing.
Did I do something wrong?
Hi Ricky,
The permalink settings need to be set to “post name”. That is mentioned in the General WordPress Settings section of the documentation. That should fix your problem.
Ooops! I missed that one! Thanks for the awesome theme and a theme great support…
I’m having trouble with the About Us section on the bottom. How do I get text to display there? What am I missing? It’s probably something simple, but my brain is running on slow today! Thanks in advance!
As I thought – simple solution – add text to the Home page I created! Thank you for such an amazing template!
the theme doesn’t display italics. Why is that?
Jubiki,
I’ll have to look into that. Most likely the italics were included in the CSS reset which removed the styling. If so, it was a mistake in the theme development and should be fixed.
I have been looking for a nice free site and this is great. One question from a complete newbie who has never built a site before.
How hard is it to add a form to gather info from people wanting to sign up for a newsletter? I would like to gather more than just their email. I want to gather their address and phone number, too. Also, where would I add something like that to this design without messing it up?
Is there any way to include past events?
Hi Anna,
No, the theme is coded to automatically exclude past events so the event list is easier to manage. If you want to include details or photos from past events I would suggest entering the data as a News item.
Hi Joseph,
Whatever mailing list manager you are using (i.e. MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, iContact, etc.) will provide you with sign up forms, and they will give you the HTML code for the form. You can then paste the code into the page content of your site, or in a text widget in your sidebar.
Hi Steven,
Thanks for the quick response! I went ahead and just created a separate past events page.
My search engine won’t work. It gives me this error message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ”%s” (T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING), expecting identifier (T_STRING) in \\WDP\DFS\30\7\2\9\3049602927\user\sites\3263381.site\www\home\wp-content\themes\simple-non-profit-theme\search.php on line 21
Thanks!