A brand new plugin to help with Church admin on your wordpress site.

• Address List
• Rotas – any number of tasks
• Visitor Tracking – to help you with follow up
• Attendance – you can track and graph Church attendance
• Bulk Email – send email to all your members (in batches if on a restrictive shared host)
• Bulk sms – send text messages to all yoru members (needs a www.bulksms.co.uk account – messages from 3.9p per sms)
• Calendar – with agenda view and month to view calendar and nth day recurring for events (e.g. 3rd Wednesday)

Installation

Download the latest version from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/church-admin/ and upload to your wordpress installation.

Activate and begin to use the plugin!
If you have been using the old church_directory plugin – migration is easy. Upload the new plugin and it will copy the directories over and move settings over for you (I recommend you backup first though!). You will need to change your short codes from [church_directory] to [church_admin]

Instructions

Entering data into the church admin plugin in the admin area is fairly self-explanatory.

The only are that needs some thought is setting up bulk email and bulk sms
Bulk Email Communication Settings
You need to know some settings for your web host – the smtp address, username, password and port number.
Some shared hosts, restrict the number of emails your website can send an hour. If you have enough email addresses stored in the directory, that will go over that limit (e.g. 100 per hour for uk2.net) then you can set the plugin to queue the emails and send them out in batches.

On Linux hosts use the Cron option – a pdf is generated that shows you what to do in your hosts Cpanel
On Windows hosts use the wp-cron option – wordpress will set up a schedule for you. Every time someone goes on your site, wordpress checks whether it needs to send another batch of emails and do so if necessary.

If you have no limits the plugin default is to send all emails straight away.

Bulk SMS settings
We find that everyone checks their mobile when a text comes in straight away. So on those occasions when you have an urgent message for the whole church, the ability to send a bulk sms to everyone is useful. Although my mobile has unlimited texts – it will only send a few copies at a time. So the church admin plugin has the ability to send lots of texts. You need to set up an account with www.bulksms.co.uk – prices start from 3.9p per sms.

Displaying data to the public

To display the address list on a page or post [church_admin type=address-list]
To show a small group list on a page or post [church_admin type=small-groups-list]
To show the list of small groups on a page or post [church_admin type=small-groups]
To show the calendar view on a page or post use [church_admin type=calendar]
To show the calendar agenda view on a page or post use [church_admin type=calendar-list]
To show the rota on a page or post [church_admin type=rota]

I suggest you make address details password protected posts – the plugin provides a logout link!

For church websites I recommend the captcha free spam protected Clean Contact contact form, Sermon Browser for mp3 management

I ‘ve tested it pretty thoroughly, so please use the support forum if you find a bug or need some technical support…