WPatch.com

This is a great, short “video” explanation if you are wondering what a blog is.

Video courtesy Common Craft

I often get questions that go something like a variation on this theme:

Is it possible to get a website for our ministry that’s free of cost?

We really can’t afford to pay for web hosting right now and just wondered if there’s something we could use for our growing ministry that is free.

Quality web hosting is fairly inexpensive these days and a domain name can be had for less than $10 a year, but I do understand that sometimes money is tight. I also understand that many people don’t have the know-how to run their own website and can’t afford to hire someone to do it for them.

In cases such as this, my short answer is usually WordPress.com.

For those who don’t know, at WordPress.org (notice the .org) there is free software that can be downloaded and installed at a web host where you are paying for web space. But at WordPress.com that same software is already installed on a server and free accounts are available for anyone who would like to start their own blog.

Yes, WordPress.com is a place for free blogs, but the beauty of WordPress is that it has some great features that lend to it’s use to maintain a traditional website where static content is maintained. And should you wish to use the blog posts feature in WordPress you can make a blog easily a part of that site as well.

But with it’s ability to have individual “pages” for static website content as apposed to “posts” for blog content, it easily fills the bill for driving a ministry related website — and at WordPress.com it’s free.

The free WordPress.org software drives this site but requires the user to pay for web space, install WordPress themselves and maintain it with regular updates.

WordPress.com is the best free option I know of today for personal or ministry sites. Some flexibility is lost when using the free WordPress.com site as apposed to the free WordPress.org software, but what you gain is the ability to have an easily updated website at no cost, and you may be able to get by without the flexibility and extras you gain by running WordPress on your own web space.

The one thing I’d suggest paying for is a domain name, which helps people remember where to find your site, and you can purchase that for about $10 per year. Otherwise your WordPress.com web address will be something like “yourname.wordpress.com”

The best way to get started is to go register for a free WordPress.com account now to discover the power and ease of building your own ministry website.

You’ve seen the link to an RSS feed like this one before, right?

RSS feeds make it easy to track when your favorite websites are updated without having to go and check each one.

Here are a couple of free online feed readers we recommend.

• feedly.com
• feedreader.com

Give your feed reader of choice an RSS feed link from the website you wish to follow for new content and you’ll find the newest posts from that site when available.

Here are a couple of resources that will help you understand RSS feeds.

• What Is RSS? RSS Explained — at WhatIsRSS.com
• Also helpful is the article What is RSS? at ProBlogger.net

Note: For a much easier method of accomplishing the task of customizing page titles as well as post titles skip this article and read the following: Customizing WordPress page and post titles.

Question: How can I give a descriptive title to a page, that appears at the top of that page when viewed, and still have a short title that appears as the link to that page in side bars and navigation bars?

Answer: The answer may seem long but it’s fairly straightforward — hang in there. But first, a couple of notes:

A note to those for whom I’ve developed a WordPress powered site: If you have a site that I’ve developed all you have to do is ask and I’ll add the functionality described below to your site. Then all you’ll need to do is skip to the part two of these instructions to find out how to use this method on your pages.

A note about this method: I realize that there may be is a better way to do this. If you think this can be improved upon I’d love to hear from you in the comments. There may even be is a plugin that adds this functionality, but I’ve not found it so far. As to the source of the code that I’ve posted here, I’ve been using this for some time and I’m not certain of the source. But I believe the source of my original inspiration was this article at Beast-Blog.com on WordPress Titles & Descriptions.

Part One: The Custom Field function

The solution I’m presenting here takes advantage of the “Custom Field” function in WordPress and requires adding a bit of code to the “Page Template” file for your chosen theme. As with any changes to your templates you should be certain you have a current backup of your files in case something goes wrong. I cannot guaranty that this will work for you but this has worked very well for me on several sites.

First let’s deal with the code that needs to be added to the “Page Template” file.

In the page template you will find the PHP code that places the “Title” at the top of your page content. It looks like the following code snippet and is usually surrounded by <h1></h1> or <h2></h2> tags and is likely near the top.

<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

If you’ve found the WordPress title tag as demonstrated above you’ll now be adding an “if, else” php statement combined with WordPress tags that uses content from the custom fields if you’ve placed anything there for the page otherwise it uses the Title of the page.

Here’s what the code looks like that needs to be placed before the above title tag in your “Page Template.”

<?php if( get_post_meta($post->ID, 'customtitle', true) ) { ?>

<h1><?php echo get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID,'customtitle',true); ?></h1>

<?php } else { ?>

Then following the exsisting Title tag in your “Page Template” place this php code:

<?php } ?>

So when you’re done pasting in the code above, your “Page Template” should contain the following:

<?php if( get_post_meta($post->ID, 'customtitle', true) ) { ?>

<h1><?php echo get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID,'customtitle',true); ?></h1>

<?php } else { ?>

<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

<?php } ?>

Get a code sample text file here: custom-title.txt

Just note that I’ve used <h1> tags to style the title in the example above, and your theme may style the title with something else, so be sure to adjust to match your theme.

And I’ve demonstrated here how to make this work for “Pages” and not “Posts”, but this same method can be used to add this functionality to “Posts”.

Part Two: Using the custom fields to customize the page title

To create a custom title for any particular page, go to the Manage > Pages section in WordPress and chose a page to edit. You may also choose to create a new page.

Near the bottom of the Write Page screen you’ll see a section called Custom Fields.

In the Key field enter “customtitle” and in the Value field enter the custom title you wish to appear at the top of your page, then click “Add Custom Field“, then save your page. As you look at your site, you’ll now have a link in your list of page links or navigation bar that uses the “Title” field contents as before, but now the title that shows on the page itself will be pulled from the contents of the custom field “customtitle”.

And once you’ve entered the “customtitle” label in the Key field under Custom Fields the first time, from then on you can choose “customtitle” from the Select pull-down menu.

That’s how to customize the titles of individual pages. You can see how it all works on this site. If you examine the link to the page “About”, when you visit that page, it’s title is “About this site…” instead of “About”.

Using Image and File Attachments in your WordPress posts – on the WordPress Codex

While not specific to WordPress I get this question often because this topic is new for many small churches. But not totally new since most churches have sound systems that have been set up for capturing sermon audio to tape. Though when you start talking about MP3’s and sermon podcasting and the like, it gets confusing. [Read more…]