Lift has acquired ChurchThemes and intend to enter the hosted church website market

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Written By Brian Krogsgard

5 thoughts on “Lift has acquired ChurchThemes and intend to enter the hosted church website market”

  1. I just launched a site for a pretty big church and it’s been one of the most challenging but rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on. It’s running a custom theme and was about a 9 month project.

    There were definitely times where things got overwhelming and I felt that the job should have been taken on by an agency, as opposed to me, by myself. The large amount of stake holders and varying needs that evolved throughout the project became dizzying.

    Despite that, it’s been great, the work is still ongoing, and I foresee a relationship that will likely last for years.

    Anyone working in the Church space will have likely heard of (or will be hearing about) CCB, the Community Church Builder church database system. If you’re needing to integrate CCB into your WordPress site, I strongly suggest you check out CCB Press.

    One of my big challenges was finding a way to integrate CCB data natively into my build. CCB has an API but that type of integration is outside of my skill set. Until recently there have been (to my knowledge) no out of the box solutions for working with WP and CCB. I was vetting candidates to hire for a custom solution when CCB Press launched and kind of saved the day for me.

    Brian, you should have a look at the good work Daniel Milner and the folks at Firetree Design are doing with CCB Press.

    Link – http://ccbpress.com

      • Daniel,

        Maybe you could share some insight as well into how much time it takes on average to integrate and link up to CCB? As well as maybe some pointers for styling it to match my church’s website?

        Thanks!

    • Hey Jimmy!

      I am just starting a project for my own church actually and I am looking to build a website on WordPress and use the CCB Press plugin. I did have a question for you though. How much time did it take would you say to do just that part? The CCB Press integration. And do you have any tips for someone starting out? We are starting CCB and launching a new WP site at the same time.

      Also, could you share a link to the site that you worked on so I can see what it looked like please?

      Thanks! 🙂

      Regards,

      Hunter

      • Hey Hunter –

        No problem. The site that I built is here – http://www.centralpc.org/

        The event list in the footer is pulling from CCB, as is the events page, and the Get Connected page. There’s a few more pages that use CCB as well.

        The theme is a custom design using Eddie Machado’s Bones starter theme as the base. It uses a lot of custom post types and advanced custom fields stuff. Every stakeholder had their own particular needs and a lot of time was spent making sure that these needs were served.

        To be honest, it’s *still* an ongoing work in progress. 🙂

        With regards to the CCBPress plugin, it was super easy to get up and running. You’ll need to create an API user in CCB and assign it the proper permissions. From there it’s as simple as inputting the CCB API key and choosing which pages you’d like your information to output to.

        Styling is easy as well, provided you have some knowledge of CSS.

        Also, I’m sure Daniel will fill you in with more details on the plugin, but I want to add that he has been excellent with support.

        Hope that helps some – I’m just getting started with my work day here, but I wanted to take a quick minute to get back to you before I shut down my email. If you have any further questions please feel free to drop me a line at jimmy at smutek dot net.
        🙂

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