Here’s a glossary of terms used in the Church Admin plugin.
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Pages
WordPress Pages are a specific type of post that is more for static content, that doesn't need to be listed chronologically.
The pages screen is very similar to the Posts Screen. Notice how one of the pages has "Front Page" next to the title. This page is the home page of the website when that has been set in Settings>Reading.
When you edit a page, the experience is similar to editing a post. There a few differences in the setting sidebar on the right hand side.
One section is called "Page Attributes". That allows you to make a page a child of another page.
Say you are creating a Tutorial page called "Installing Church Admin". Create the parent page "Tutorials" first and then the subpages can be adjusted to be children of Tutorials.
The reason that is helpful is because the web address of the finished page would then look like this
www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/installing-church-admin
Plugin
A WordPress plugin changes or adds some functionality to your WordPress website.
Some plugins do a very simple but important job, like protecting you from spam comments (WordPress comes with Akismet to do that. We recommend AntiSpam Bee, which is free or the cheaper than Akismet Clean Talk). Others are far more comprehensive. Plugins are best installed from the website dashboard, by clicking on Plugins, Add new and searching for what you need.
Church Admin is a fairly advanced plugin that adds a lot of functionality to a church website including member management, scheduling tools, podcasting, calendars and so on. Do have a look around the rest of this site to see all the features.
Podcasting
Podcasts are digital audio content distributed over the internet using a podcast hosting service. In the Church Admin Plugin this is typically a church's sermon recordings, that are made available for anyone to listen to. People can subscribe to your podcast on their favourite platform (e.g. Spotify, Apple, Amazon) and will get the latest sermon content easily.
Church Admin allows you to upload sermons and add in details like Title, Description, even a transcript. You can also add your Youtube share URL to show the video recording.
There are tools to set up the podcast.xml file, which is the list of sermons in a special format for podcasting services like Apple, Amazon and Spotify to publish them free for you.
There is a tutorial page on how to setup the podcasts
Posts
WordPress has two main types of content - Posts and Pages.
Posts are typically blog entries. They are listed usually in descending chronological order (the latest posts first). You might not want a blog - but if you are displaying latest news or updates, that's a blog concept, so use Posts to do that.
If you click on "Posts" in the left hand menu, a list of post appears as above.
- "Add a new Post" button at the top allows you to create a new post
- If you hover over a post title, a sub menu appears
- Edit - allows you to edit that post
- Quick Edit - allows you to edit basic information such as Title, Slug, Date plus a few other options
- Bin - deletes the post
- View - opens the post as a user would see it in a fresh window
- The checkboxes to left of each title allow you to do some bulk features for selected posts like Bin.
The posts screen is similar to the pages screen and any custom post types you have activated.
"Custom post types" are content posts for specialised purposes - these glossary entries are a custom post type. The Church Admin plugin also has "Bible Readings", "Prayer Requests" and "App Content" as custom post types.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are a way of sending a message to people connected to your church who are smartphone users. They typically appear on the lock screen of the phone and may beep. It's a great way of messaging everyone or targetted groups of people quickly.
It's a Premium plugin feature and push notifications can be sent to
- Groups of people by setting the filter on the Church Admin > Communications>Push Message people.
- When a blog post is published
- When a Bible reading is published
- When a Prayer Request is published
- To admins when there is a new Contact form message
Every user who has the "Our Church" app can enable push messaging and so push notifications will only be received by users who have the app and have enabed push notifcations.
You can upgrade to the Premium version of the plugin to get this feature in your Church Admin Dashboard or with this link
