Stylish Church WordPress Theme
Published in WordPress ThemesChurches need to have an effective web presence in order to communicate with members and attenders as well as to attract new visitors. The problem is that most churches are working with very limited budgets when it comes to having a website designed or developed. This free theme can help out by giving your church an attractive and effective web presence on a shoestring budget.
Theme features include:
- Customizable slider on home page
- Events calendar
- Custom post type for audio files with audio player
- Upload your own logo, or just use the site title in text
- 4 color schemes from which to chose (see details below)
This free theme has everything your church needs for an effective website. First, choose from four different color schemes to get a site that matches your church’s identity (screenshots or alternate color schemes are at the end of this page).
Your home page will include a slider that can be easily customized from the WordPress dashboard. Without touching any code you can upload new images for slides, (optionally) set any of the images to link to a specific page when clicked, and set the transition effect between slides. The slider is a great way to promote upcoming events, special programs or initiatives, a current sermon series. or anything else that needs exposure.
Every church website needs some type of upcoming events list or calendar functionality. This theme allows you to enter events and they will displayed chronologically in order of the event date. As the date and time passes, the event will automatically disappear from the list so you won’t need to constantly update the site manually after each event.
At the top of the site’s header there is an area for custom text, intended to be used to display the time of your services. Enter your church’s address in the WordPress dashboard and it will automatically create a link to the map and directions from Google Maps.
The theme includes a custom post type for audio media files, so it’s easy to add sermon audios to your site. And more importantly, it’s easy for visitors to listen to them right on your site. We recommend using a service like Amazon S3 to host audio files so they do not put a strain on your hosting account, although this is not necessary depending on your host and the size of your files.
Documentation for the theme is available here.
View the theme demo | Download for free
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Alternate Color Schemes:
83 Responses
Great Theme. Simple. Stylish.
Thank you.
Very nice theme!
Thanks Arif and Vipin.
Finding a theme which suits your needs may be difficult but through the help of sites like yours, new users of the blogging scene get the help they require to get them started. The theme you provided looks very stylish and it was well explained in this article, targetting non-profit making organisations. The fact that it is downloadable for free makes it a very attractive option for such organisations. Also, providing different schemes that can be used by users was a good idea, and also regarding the hosting of the website. Keep up the great work on the highly informative articles which go into depth about the individual themes and their attributes.
Can’t seem to figure out how to get the three column view on the homepage and it’s not in the documentation anywhere.
Hi Chris,
It is in the documentation (page 17). You create a page called “Home”, or whatever you want to call it, and assign it the “home” template. That template will give it the 3 column layout. You then will set that page to be shown on the front page.
Nice theme. It’s so nice to the eyes. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the tip, Steven. I’ve figured it out and fully populated a test site for a church. Link to the page behind my name.
Two questions:
1. Is there a way to make events persistent? I would like to list Sunday service under Upcoming Events without having to 52 events for it.
2. Are you aware that the Browse and Upload buttons overlap each other in Theme Options under General Settings and that “address” is spelled “Adrress” under Common Options?
I’ve fixed issue #2 and will gladly send you the updated files to replace in the theme files. Here’s a screenshot of the changes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7541063/ThemeOptions.jpg. I widened the options area and the options. I also updated/replaced the text to fix typos and clarify the settings.
I still think a “Recurring Events” option would be a good feature to have for a church website. I realize this is a free theme, so you may not be doing much with it past the the version, but I’ll give my request a shot anyway. I work for a software company so I fully understand the “that’s a good idea, but we’re not going to do that now/ever” response.
Nice theme and good job for putting to free download.
Put a paypal donate button somwhere on your website, maybe someonw will be glad to give you a beer for your work
Hi Chris,
You can send the theme files to info@vandelaydesign.com. What browser/OS are you using? The buttons aren’t overlapping for me.
As of now there is not a way to create recurring events. To be honest, I didn’t really think of the events calendar as being used for weekly services. I”ve seen a number of church event calendars where the weekly services are on there over and over again and they drown out other one-time events. Personally, I prefer to see service times listed separately, which is what I had in mind with designing the header. However, you’re right that it would be a nice feature for those who want to use it. While it is a free theme, I do want it to be as useful as possible. I’ll look into it and see if it might be possible. Since the event calendar is using custom post types it may not be possible, but I’ll look into it.
Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it. We just started distributing themes so there’s a learning process to see what works and what doesn’t, so feedback helps with that process and it should help to increase the quality of themes to come in the future.
I have been looking high and low on the internet for a good wordpress theme that would work for my new project. It is harder than I thought. I wanted to buy a theme that I could change and make all mine. This has been difficult for me to do. A friend reminded me about your site and I am glad that I checked you out. I really think that this is going to do the trick for me.
Steven,
Firefox 12 on Mac 10.6.8 with the latest WordPress official release. Saw it happening on two different installations but didn’t test other browsers. I’ll send over the files this week.
The reason I asked is that I’m working on a site for a small church plant that only really has 3 events during the week right now. So being able to just post those in a very conspicuous place like the events list would be perfect for them.
My theme coding comes down to basically editing what someone else has already built and trying to figure out how they do things. I’m still confused as to how you built the home page with the rotator and the three columns. I’ve never tried to customize a theme to use that format but I really like it.
Very nice theme. Useful for community and club sites. Thanks for releasing it free.
Hi,
This theme is great! one thing though… is there a way to replace the flash player on the media for one that will play in-browser (and that can work with smartphones and i-devices) similar to wpaudio or audio player??
Thanks for helping this noob.
Hi Victor,
When you download the theme you’ll have all the theme files, so you can edit and change the files any way you want to make the site how you want it. It’s not using a plugin for the media player, so it would require editing the theme files.
Good, simple clean theme.
Thanks for sharing.
Is there any documentation with this theme? I cannot get any of the slider photos to work. It has the frame for it, but no picture will show up.
Any help?
Thanks.
Andy,
Yes, everything is documented. There is a link to download the documentation in the post (right above the download link for the theme).
Very clean looking WordPress theme. Thank you for making it available.
Question:
When I click on an event and open that particular page, the event date is incorrect. For the day of the month, it shows and uses the number of that particular month. So if the event is in July, all of the dates will show 7 as the day, it will use 8 for any event in August and so on.
(ie: July 7, 2012 instead of July 4, 2012, or June 6, 2012 instead of June 17, 2012) This is happening to all of my event dates.
What do I need to do to correct this? Any suggestions?
Thank you in advance for your help.
Hi Katie,
The first thing I would try is, go to the General Settings in the WordPress dashboard and select the date format that you want to use and click “save changes”. If that doesn’t work please let me know the URL of the site so I can take a look at it. And if possible, email me the username and password to login to the site so I can check it out (email to info@vandelaydesign.com).
Nice theme! Do you know how I can get the tagline to appear beneath the site name in the header? Thank you for your help.
Hi Sage,
You would have to edit the themes header.php file to do that.
Every time I try to host an audio file when you click on it to listen to it nothing appears in the audio player box. What am I doing wrong? My audio files are hosted on a different server than my website is.
Alex,
If you can send your WordPress username and password to info@vandelaydesign.com I will login to the site and take a look at it.
Set-up theme per your instructions.
On Home page, the Upcoming Events and Recent Messages links are giving me a 404 error.
The Events, Blog and Media menus don’t show anything… and I’m linking to the blog from the site provider rather than our church blog.
thanks
Steven,
You need to change the permalinks settings, as shown in the theme documentation. The events link goes to http://piucc.org/events/ but your events page URL is http://piucc.org/?page_id=14. That permalink structure is not advised.
I’m not sure what you are asking about the blog because when I click on the blog link in your navigation menu it leads me to the blog.
Perfect!!!
That’s what I get for printing the instructions four pages per sheet of paper.
We looked at many church themes, and this one contains just what we were looking for… and just what our staff can maintain.
Thanks
What about commenting the events? It doesn’t seem to work… I goes to a white page and nothing else happens…
Jacek,
I will look into this and post an update.
Well first of all, thanks for the post. Really love this and looks pretty simple and clean. I am going to try this.
I love this theme but am having trouble getting the slider to work. I also need help getting the tagline under header, if possible.
Thanks!!
Hannah,
Please email your URL and WordPress login info to info@vandelaydesign.com and I’ll take a look at the slider issue. The theme is not coded to display the tagline or site description, so you would have to edit the header.php file to change that.
I would like to thank you Steven for offering this theme. Not only have you blessed us with a no-cost theme, you have also been so helpful in your documentation and descriptions on how to set up the theme. As I began my first attempt at building a website earlier this week, I was so happy to come across the ‘Stylish Church Theme’ which walked me through this process so clearly and efficiently. Can you tell I am excited about this resource? It was just so refreshing to find the theme and documentation so well laid out after the steep learning curve (for a ‘rookie’) of finding a domain host, choosing a domain name, linking the two, installing wordpress, etc.
Thank you Steven. Your gift of this theme will continue to be a blessing to us!
Hannah,
I also had the same problem – the slider did not work. As a solution I used easing-slider which works almost as well as the original one. It may also help you.
Thanks Steven for the templates!
I have an event called Catch posted, when I click on it I see the following at the end of the description:
No Response to “Catch”
Comments are closed.
How do I remove this?
Thanks! Irene
Hi Irene,
When I click on “Catch” I see the event details listed, so it seems to be working. If you’re still having problems you can email me at info@vandelaydesign.com with your WordPress username and password and I will login and take a look.
I installed the theme but slider does not work, any suggest?
Blessings
Carlos,
You need to create a home page and set it to use the home page template. It’s all covered in the theme documentation linked above – http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/theme-documentation/documentation-for-stylish-church-wordpress-theme/
Thanks Steven!
In the documentation you specify that the slide image should be at least 940X458, if I want to change the slide background to fit a image of 1000X150, what php function I need to change?
Thanks, Carlos
Carlos,
That change would require also changing the layout and CSS because the width of the entire page is only 960 pixels.
Hi Steven,
I have to issue:
1. I want to change all tittles (Upcoming events, view all, archive,etc…) from English to Spanish in my homepage, what do I have to do to get this? I tried to change some in the file template-home.php but it seems that some links got broken.
2. Based on the documentation, I created the home, events and media page; however when I click on “view all upcomming events” or “browse the massage archives” it send me to 404 (Page Not Found) Error.
Let me know please.
Ok, I solved the second issue by changing the permalinks rule.
Carlos
Hi Carlos,
Yes, you would have to change the text in the theme files in order to get that text into Spanish. If you only change the text of the words and not any other code in the template-home.php it shouldn’t cause any links to break.
An for your second question, which you already fixed, in the documentation for general WP settings it covers changing the permalink structure.
Hello,
I appreciate your efforts in designing this theme. It saved me a lot of time and resources. Is there a way to display the upcoming events in calendar format in the events page?. I tried to use a plugin but you have to enter each event twice. Is there a way to do this without a lot of modifications to the theme?
Hi John,
The theme is made to display them in list format. There is no built-in functionality to do this, so you would have to make those customizations to the theme files. I know there are a lot of event plugins out there, but I have no idea if any of them would allow you to achieve this. I think most of them would require you to enter events using the plugin rather than the events custom post type used by the theme, but I could be wrong.
Hi Steven,
I don’t know why when I click the box “view all upcoming events” in the home page and click in the same link in other pages it take me to page called “blog”. I already created the page events according with the documentation and it does work good when the page events directly. Here is my page: http://dialogojc.org
Carlos
Ok, all the problems were solved.
Carlos
Hey Carlos,
How did you solve the problem? I’m having the same issue
Hi John,
What I did does not make much sense but try to trash (uninstall) the pages Media, Home and Events and create them again. Another thing I did was upload again in my hosting the file template-home.php becouse I had modified some things there to translate the tittles from English into Spanish.
Carlos
John,
If you modified some files of the theme like me, I would suggest you to re-install again the complete zip file theme in your hosting.
Carlos
Carlos,
I think what happened to me was a mismatch of url(sleeping). Any broken/unavailable page goes to the blog page. That was how I solved it
John
Hi Steven,
I want to change the background color of all pages but I don’t know where exactly is this specific code. Is it in the style.css file?
Carlos
Carlos,
Yes, you would need to edit the style.css file. Each color scheme also has it’s own CSS file and there may be a change needed in that file too.
Hi, I am having troublre figuring out how to write the content for the about us colume on the front page. There is no widget or backend side otions to add the content . Im sure im just over looking something easy. If you would help me that would be great.
I love the theme its amazing , thank you so much i would love to donate for the use of this theme thanks again.
Hi,
When I made a “Events page” and “Media page”, I both chose “Events” Template and “Media” template.
However, the permalinks doesn’t changes to /events or /media.
For that reason, I get error message when I click the “view all Upcoming Events” and “browse the message archives” banners.
If I change the permalinks from Setting > Permalinks > and chose Post name (/%postname%/), then I can get /events for “Event page” but it doesn’t work at all.
please help..
Hi Cecil,
The issue may be related to the fact that the site is in Korean. Without the permalinks setting being changed those links are going to continue to not work, but you should be able to change them manually. If you email me at info@vandelaydesign.com with your username and password I think I can take care of the issue. I’ll need to know which URL you want the links to the Events page and the Media page to point to. What’s odd is that the dead links are not giving you the WordPress 404 error. I haven’t seen that before, so that is why I am wondering if it is related to the language.
Hello, l love the theme but I’m having an issue with my Event page. I created an event that displays correctly on the homepage and on the sidebars of my other pages but on the actual Event page, the date is not correct. For example I set the event date for December 19, 2012 which displays on the homepage correctly but on the Event page it says December 12, 2012. How can I correct this?
Hey, first of all, thanks for this awesome theme!
We’re having an issue with our events disappearing. We’re on central time, but the events seem to be disappearing on a UTC schedule (6 hours early)
I’d initially gone into the wordpress settings when this happened and realized that I hadn’t set our local time – but now that I have, the issue is still happening.
Any suggestions on a fix so the event calendar uses the local time?
Just to follow up on my own question, I think I found the solution: I had forgotten to setup the time offset in the website’s settings page when I first set it up, and in the meantime someone had scheduled all these events.
I had corrected the local time setting – but I guess this doesn’t go through and apply the correct time offset to each post. So I just did a “quick edit” on each of the previously scheduled events, and re-saved them.
Sorry for the false alarm!
Hi Aaron,
Yes, I suggest setting the time first before entering events. I’m not sure exactly how WordPress handles scheduled posts when you change the timezone, but I’m glad that you got it sorted out.
Hello Steven, any suggestions for my issue?
Chanel,
Can you send your WordPress username and password to info@vandelaydesign.com? With that I can login and take a look.
Sure thing.
Thanks for the great theme! It works very well for what we are doing.
I am having problems though with the audio part of the theme. The player will popup but it won’t play the file (it tries to but fails). I tried one of your other demo sites and it works great on there. I also got the file itself to play through quicktime. I’m not sure where the problem is. If anyone could help out it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the free theme,
Josh
Josh,
Can you email your WordPress username and password to me at info@vandelaydesign.com so I can login and take a look behind the scenes?
Thank you very much for your themes. I was wondering how to make the header menu bold as well as submenu. I went to the style.css and added font-weight:bold but there is nothing change. Thank very much. – Joe.
Hi Joe,
You’ll want to find this code in the style.css file:
color:#333;
}
And change it to:
color:#333;
font-weight:bold;
}
I just tried it on our demo and it worked fine, but the bold style of that font is not that much different than the regular version, at least at that small size.
Hi Steven,
You are right. It is not much different. Is there a way that I can change the font bigger?
Thank you very much for your help.
Joe,
You can use CSS to change the font size.
Thanks for the theme; I used it as a starter for this site:
http://stalschurch.com/
Thanks a lot for this free theme. It is a very big relief for a lot of us at this part of the world (Africa) where making payment for anything online is somehow not easy. So, finding a great theme like this free is wonderful. Thanks.! Thanks!! Thanks!!!. May God bless you roundly. Amen.
Thank you so much for the free template. It is exactly what we are looking for. I have run into a problem, though, and it quite possibly is one of my own making. On the homepage, each event looks correct, however, once I click on the event, the date on the event’s page will be December 12, 2012. The sidebar on the same page still has the correct date. Would you point me in the right direction to address this? Thanks
Hi Jason,
When did you download the theme? We had this problem in the past but we updated the theme about a month ago. The reason I ask when you downloaded it is because if it was within the past month I’ll need to take another look at it. If it was more than a month ago then I know why the problem exists.
The solution is to go to Appearance > Editor from the WP dashboard. Choose the single-events.php file. Find the code:
And it should be followed by:
I think the “j” is the issue. If you make that change and save the file it should take care of the issue. If you need assistance with that you can send your WP username and password to info@vandelaydesign.com and I will make the change for you.
It was several months ago. Thanks a ton for the speedy response.
It worked perfectly. Thanks
Really nice results! Great themes
Hi, I was wondering how do you delete sermons? I have deleted the audio files but the home page and the sermons page still have the audio file information posted. I checked all posts and nothings there.
Thanks, Josh
Got it figured out!
Thanks
I have just installed this theme on our churches website and in the process of setting everything up. I have run into one issue, I have added the phone number to the options area, but it is not showing up in the theme.
Also, how would I go about adding a copyright line at the bottom center of the page. I am fairly new to WP and still learn this all. Thanks
Chris H.
If you want me to take a look at the phone number issue you can email your WordPress username and password to info@vandelaydesign.com. For the copyright at the bottom of the page you would need to edit the footer.php file.
I am having trouble with the ‘browse media archives’ link on the home page. Since the church does not record their sermons we thought to use this area for their newsletter. I went into the Home Page Template and changed the name from ‘recent messages’ to ‘The Key ~ Parish Newsletter. I created a page with the same name and used the media template. When I click on the link for the archives it takes me to that page however, instead of having the links to the newsletter on it, it has the word Blog on it.
I appreciate you making the theme available for free and for any help you can offer. I am not familiar with BlueHost but I will definitely support your efforts and look into them for hosting this site.
Hi Karen,
If you email your WordPress username and password to info@vandelaydesign.com I will login and take a look at it. Also please send the URL of the site.