We’ve built a few Church sites before… and we’ve learned what the most common things you’ll need are. We’ve built in everything that you’ll need, including premium plugin integrations, custom widgets, WooCommerce products (great for books and merch!) and a handful of the highest quality plugins available for sliders, drag and drop content editing, and lots more!

Stop wasting time trying to chase down a wild zoo of different plugins and themes – everything you need is right here!

“No Headaches” Developer’s Note: We’re using plugins for all of this stuff – so should you choose to want to change themes later on, you won’t lose your content for any of the built in features!

Customize your login for users with our built in Custom Login Maker. This Custom Login Maker will give you the ability to provide the best perception of your church or non-profit. This is great for non-profit institutions that want to give the best experience possible to their users.

Passage comes fully integrated with a new “Staff” role specifically built for church & non-profit institutions. This new Staff role provides users with the ability to add, edit, and update their profile page, along with their pages, sermons and posts. This role is similar to the “Author” role native to WordPress, with added tools and abilities to provide your users with a simple and excellent experience.

Notice the simplicity of the dedicated panel for Staff users. We tried to make this as easy as updating your Facebook status. This dashboard only includes the necessary information for this user role (ie. their own posts, pages & profile). Under Posts/Sermons/Pages, users will only see these that they’ve created and/or are currently assigned to them. They can open any one of these to begin updating/editing the information and content (ie. additional materials, study guides, etc.) to meet their leading style.

This theme extends the basic profile fields provided by WordPress including: a custom profile photo uploader and staff specific fields (such as department, title, specialty, and additional contact information). All of these fields are then used on the Advanced User Page & Custom Sidebars.

We’ve extended the basic profile fields and custom built user profile pages to have more relevant and usable content. User pages now include information that visitors can actually use, such as office hours, contact info, and a list of their sermons. And for each Sermon, the Staff member assigned will display in the sidebar with their image, name, department, contact, and a link to more of their sermons. This is hugely helpful to limit confusion for visitors who are watching sermons that have several sections with different speakers.

Why are we doing so much for users? Because we believe a user shouldn’t be a Custom Post Type. WordPress has included the power to query users, and that’s exactly what were doing for the User Directory page template.

Creating a directory of staff is really simple. Just navigate to any page (or create a new one) and assign the User Directory page template. A new drop-down list of options will be provided for you including, filtering users by Sermon Categories or by a Manual User Selection.

Adding a new sermon is easy! Just navigate to Sermons > Add New to add a new sermon. Each sermon has four distinct option sections:

01 – The Media Section: is used to distinguish the sermon from others by providing options for source material. For example: video media, audio media, download media – and some extended options like a poster image for each.

02 – The Content/Text Section: (Visual Composer) allows for staff to provide more dynamic content such as sermon notes, study guides, additional reading, etc.

03 – The Sermon Categories Section: is where categories can be managed for this sermon. See Sermon Catalog section for more details on how this is used.

04 – The Sermon Player Section: is where you can assign a specific player to your sermon. The Sermon Player assigned will then be used for how the sermon media looks and acts. See Sermon Player Section for more details.

Adding a new sermon player is easy! Just navigate to Sermon Players > Add New to add a new sermon player. Each sermon player has two distinct option sections:

01 – The Build Section: is used to build the main structure & function of player, from toggling elements on & off to building a dynamic playlist. Players can be used as static players or as dynamic players.

02 – The Styles Section: is used to manage the styles of the player, from background colors & images to font sizes, families, and colors. It even offers the ability to call bg images from the sermon dynamically.

Each player can be assigned to a sermon (or sermons) to dictate how they are displayed and function. This is where the power of this starts to show – and saves users a ton of time from needing building the same sermon styles over and over.

This is where the power of the Sermons Player plugin really comes to life and creating a catalog is really simple. Just navigate to any page (or create a new one) and assign the Sermon Catalog page template. A new drop-down list of options will be provided for you including, filtering sermons by Sermon Category and selecting a number of sermons per page. The theme will do the rest. This catalog will be provided after any relevant content included in the Page Editor (Frontend or Backend).

Sermon Categories have been separated from “standard” categories used for posts to keep things neat and organized, so there won’t be any confusion. For example, you could use a Sermon Category titled “Youth Department” for all youth related sermons > Then use this Sermon Category to isolate and display only sermons from this Sermon Category.

Powered by the Give – WordPress Donation Plugin, you’ll have the most robust WordPress system available for accepting donations. On top of that, we’ve extended this plugin to work even better with this theme. We’re maintaining all of their base functionality – and including some cool extensions that we use in our own projects.

We’re also including a custom Visual Composer module to make this even easier. Just add the Give Item module and select one of your give forms from the dropdown. Then, if you want, you can use the extra included options to customize this module further.

Powered by The Events Calendar Plugin, you’ll have the ability to create and manage your calendar of events with ease. Get professional-level quality and features with this integration – and The Events Calendar will help take your site to the next level.

On top of that, we’ve extended this plugin to work even better with this theme. We’re maintaining all of their base functionality – and including updated styles and outputs.

Yep. WooCommerce is enabled on this theme, which means you can use it to sell anything, beautifully – like shirts, gift cards, or anything else you can dream up. WooCommerce does a TON of amazing stuff out of the box and we’ve setup the integration so that this theme will work seamlessly with it. We’ve also gone through and made sure all of the styles match to the theme styles/options.

Blogging is at the very heart of WordPress and we haven’t forgotten. This theme includes our custom Blog Page Template, which has been used by over 20k+ users across 15+ themes. It utilizes the power of WordPress and focuses on clean, consistent, professional design. Categories assigned are used to filter posts that are displayed – and because this is a page template, you can have as many blog pages that you want. This is really helpful when you want to offer a filtered blog for a specific group of people (ie. Families, Senior Citizens, etc.).

We are proud to be including our custom Post Grid Page Template, which has been used by over 20k+ users across 15+ themes. It utilizes the power of Isotope to “filter & sort magical layouts” and focuses on clean, usable interactions. Categories assigned are used to filter, sort, and animate posts visibility. We’ve even including updated styles, an updated hover animation, and new lightbox integration for this.

We’re including several layout options including: default, sidebar left, sidebar right, dual sidebars right, dual sidebars left, dual sidebars left/right, and full width (no sidebars). With Visual Composer, you have even more control by stretching the row, stretching the row and content, and assigning specific columns widths to rows (ie. 1/4 + 1/4 +1/2). You can also add a row inside of a row to make this more flexible.

We specifically built Passage with this in mind. Staff can add and edit any information that they find relevant for their own sermons/pages/posts. So a High School Pastor can add the required reading for the week, a Junior High Pastor can add a study guide for an upcoming meeting, and a Small Group Leader can update the group notes if something unexpected happened during the week. The idea here is to give your staff an easy way to communicate with their groups, online. To make this even easier, we’ve included a premium drag and drop page builder with front end editing abilities!

The most powerful drag and drop page builder we’ve ever encountered is also the easiest use. And to make life (and adding content) even easier, we’ve included Visual Composer – the most popular award winning drag and drop page builder with with frontend and backend editors! This premium plugin is usually $34 USD, but comes free with your purchase of Passage.

Slider Revolution is powering over 1,000,000 WordPress sites! It’s not just a slider, but a new way to deliver ideas. It’s an innovative, responsive WordPress Slider Plugin that displays your content the beautiful way. Slider Revolution has made building professional sliders easier. Whether it’s a Slider, Carousel, Hero Scene or even a whole Front Page, the visual, drag & drop editor will let you tell your own stories in no time!

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to code. Having Visual Composer included means that you can quickly edit layouts and add modules to Sermons, Pages, and Posts without sorting through a long list of shortcodes and approved syntax. This also includes some helpful pre-built templates and placeholder content if your in a rush or don’t know where to start. And if you need it, you can transfer content from one page to another by saving it as a new template.

Yep! We’re recommending Shortcodes Ultimate for those of you who want to push your content even further. Why? Because, as awesome as Visual Composer is, we’ve found that some users like to have options. Also, there are some instances where using Shortcodes Ultimate can easily extend even a Visual Composer module (ie. Text Module, Hover Image, etc.). For example, if you have a module open that provides the standard content editor and want some text to open/trigger a lightbox without coding additional markup, Shortcodes Ultimate provides an easy to use shortcode adder. Pretty cool for those who like complete control.

Powered by Max Mega Menu, you can create widgetized mega menus using the built in visual mega menu builder. This integration includes features like drag & drop Mega Menu builder, the ability to display WordPress widgets, support for traditional “flyout” menus along with Mega Menu sub-menus, opening menus with hover intent and click events, fade and slide transitions, along with adding icons to menu items and many more.

We get it, you want to customize the theme. With this theme options panel, you can. This theme options panel is organized in to sections, including: Theme Basics, Tophat Options, Header Options, Sticky Header Options, Layout Options, Skin Builder, Post Options, Sermon Options, Author Options, Footer Options, Social Options, Custom CSS, Custom Scripts, Documentation, Custom Login.

You don’t actually need to change anything here, but in the event that you want to modify something – the options are there.

Eliminate the guesswork from customizing the theme. Built on the WP Theme Customizer API with some special tricks blended in, you can change just about every typographic or color across the entire theme… there’s no need to reload the page on the front-end though – the Theme Customizer will show you an instant preview of what your changes look like right there on the same screen.

Getting just the right blend of fluid, fixed, and intelligently collapsing layouts that don’t break didn’t just happen overnight. We’ve been one of the first crews to built responsive WP themes and we really get excited about making the mobile and tablet experience awesome for everyone!