Your website needs will change over time. Perhaps you need a new logo, branding, or website design. Maybe you’ll find that you need a new tool to do those every day tasks or a new project or program altogether. These are some of our favorite puzzles to solve at Worship Times. Finding the right tool for the job, testing it, and putting it to the real test – real life use on your website.
When we find a new tool to add to one member’s website, they are often useful for other ministries. We add it to our toolbox of plugins available for all of our members. You may not see those tools appear on your dashboard unless you need them, so we like to share the new things we’re excited about. If these are helpful to you, ask us to make them available on your site! (This may include add-ons to plugins, like the ones we talk about below.)
New Plugins
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MemberPress
We are especially excited about our latest addition to our plugin offerings. MemberPress is an impressive membership registration system created for WordPress sites that allows you to create very specific access to resources on your site. That way you don’t have to password-protect a bunch of pages, with just as many passwords to remember, or a password that gets passed out like church keys (do you know who all has keys to your church?).
With MemberPress you can easily set up membership levels with different levels of access. You can keep these member users out of the dashboard of your website, while still providing all the access they need.
MemberPress also integrates with MailChimp so you can sign people up for your mailing lists. It integrates with Amazon S3 which allows you to store your files off your website, and prevent them from eating up your available website data storage. You can use most of the standard payment programs like PayPal and Authorize.net, which provides a wide variety of payment options. And you can encourage members to sign up other members through an affiliate program, which easily can be added to your MemberPress functionality.
For churches and other ministries who want to offer unique resources to their members without a lot of fuss, MemberPress is a great solution.
AddThis
AddThis is one of the most popular ways to share posts and links on social media, directly from your website. You have always been able to add social share buttons on your site, but AddThis makes it easier than ever to do so.
New Add-ons for Gravity Forms
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Gravity Forms has been our go-to forms creator for years, and has recently added some add-ons that are particularly helpful to our members.
One of the biggest headaches with online forms is the lack of ability to collect real signatures. Many of our members have still relied on paper forms to do their registrations where a signature is required. But now we can capture live signatures on Gravity Forms, whether you are using a touch screen (mobile or tablet), touch pad, or mouse.
With Gravity Forms, you are also now able to add the ability to upload files to a form directly from your Dropbox folders, or download a file to your Dropbox.
If your team uses Slack to communicate, there are also some simple Slack integrations to notify you when a form has been submitted.
Additionally, though this is not a new feature for Worship Times, did you know you can create a form with save and continue features with Gravity Forms? We’ve been able to do it for a while, but many of our members didn’t know that ability was included.
What’s Next?
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We don’t know what’s next, but we will continue to keep our eyes open for plugins and add-ons that help our members do their work well. And if you have questions or requests for additional plugins, reach out to us through our support system – we’d love to see what’s possible for you!
