Frequently Asked Questions
If we haven’t answered your question here, please head over to the support forums to ask it there.
If you’re having problems or just feeling confused, check out the answers below – they might just help you!
If we haven’t answered your question here, please head over to the support forums to ask it there.
If you’re having problems or just feeling confused, check out the answers below – they might just help you!
In your dashboard, go to Appearance – Menus. In the Menu page, scroll down until you see the box that says ‘Pages’ on the left hand side. If you don’t see your page title in that little box, be sure to click ‘View All’. Once you’ve found your page, select it by ticking the check-box, then hit the ‘Add to Menu’ button. The page will be added to the bottom of the menu you are editing. Drag and drop the menu item to wherever you’d like it to appear in your navigation (indent it to the right if you want to make it a ‘child’ of another menu item), then click the ‘Save Menu’ button. Make sure that your site is using the menu you want as your primary navigation (this is set towards the bottom of the Menus page), then go and refresh your site-view tab to see the results – success!
This is a question that a lot of webmasters ask: you have your lovely Order of Service/Church Magazine/Event Flyer/Quiz sheet or whatever, and you want to make it available to people via your site. This is a good way to make your site work for you, and it’s easy enough to do. First of all, you need to create your pdf in whatever programme you are using to create it. If you’re working in Word, it’s easy enough – you simply hit ‘Save As’ then change the file type to ‘.pdf’ once you’ve named it.
Next, you need to upload the pdf file to your site’s media library: in your dashboard, select ‘Media’, ‘Add New’. This will take you to a page where you can add the file either by dragging and dropping it into the active area, or else by clicking ‘Select Files’ and then navigating to select it (much like uploading an image file). Once the file has uploaded, select the ‘Edit’ link beside the file name, and here you can change its name, description, add a caption if you want to. Once you’re done, hit the ‘Update’ button on the right. Then click in the field below ‘File URL’. This is your file’s ‘address’ in cyberspace. Select all the contents of that field (right click, select all; or ctrl/cmd + a), and copy (right click, copy; or ctrl/cmd + c).
The next task is to go to wherever you want to add the button – let’s imagine you’re doing that in a page for now. Go to your writing pane for that page (click ‘edit page’, or ‘add new’ if you’re starting from scratch), click wherever in your text you want the button to appear. Then click the ‘Add Shortcode’ button at the top – here’s what it looks like:
This will give you a lightbox with lots of options. For now, select ‘Button’; here is where you can configure your button. First of all, tell the site what the button should say on it, then paste (right click, paste; or ctrl/cmd + v) your media file’s URL (which you just copied to your clipboard a moment ago) into the ‘Link URL’ field. You can also decide what colour and size you’d like the button to be. Be sure to tell it that the ‘Button Target’ should be a ‘New Window’ – this will mean that your media file opens up in a separate tab or window rather than navigating your site user away from the page they were on. Ignore ‘Button Title’ and ‘Button CSS Class’, then click ‘Insert Shortcode’.
You should then get a shortcode (you can spot a shortcode because they are enclosed by square brackets) in your text pane, which will look something a bit like this:
[ button link="http://forumurc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/iChurch-Flyer-Summer-2017.pdf" color="dark_blue" target="_blank" size="large"]iChurch Flyer[/button ]
Now all you need to do is publish the page to see your button showing, a bit like this one:
iChurch FlyerAs with any links you add to the site, it’s important to test the button itself to check it works.
Once you’ve done that, why not go back to that little innocent-looking ‘Add Shortcode’ button and discover the whole world of Theme Boulevard shortcodes that it can provide you with? It’s lots of fun, and a great way to enhance your site – have a play!
Ever wondered (or forgotten!) how to change that bit at the top of your site where it shows your name/logo/tagline etc?
It’s easy, but it’s perhaps not what you would expect. To change it, head to Appearance – Theme Options. In iChurch 5, the bit you want is under the first tab, “Layout”, and is the top section, “Header”. Here you will see a dropdown under the title “Logo”, and the options you have are either to display your site title, or site title and tagline (these are the ones set in Settings – General), or you can have custom text, which you input into the field that appears when you select this option, or else you can have an image.
By default, when we set up a new site, we install an image file there, which has the United Reformed Church logo (or not if you are not a URC church!), the name of your church, and a tagline of some kind, most often the phrase taken from the URC’s Catch The Vision Statement: “God’s people, transformed by the gospel, making a difference for Christ’s sake.”
If you want to change what’s there, but still to have a logo in it, you will need to create a new image file that includes the logo (we give you some of the URC logo files, plus the guidelines as to how to use it, when your site is first set up on iChurch 5 – but you can also get all of the files and details from: http://www.urc.org.uk/urc-logo.html), along with any text you want to include. You need to do this in some form of image-editing software: if you have something like Photoshop Elements installed on your machine, that’s great, or if you are on an Apple device you can achieve it in Pages and then export as a PDF and then convert to a PNG). The default file we install is 3000px x 300px, to give you some idea of the dimension you are aiming for – and if you convert it to a PNG and make the background transparent, your will sit nicely against the background of the site looking as though it belongs there.
Once you have uploaded your file, click the ‘Use for Logo’ blue button, then don’t forget to click the next blue button too, to save all the changes you have made (there are other changes you can make here, such as the text above the header, the social media links etc) – and then, hey presto – your site will now be displaying your lovely new header!
There are two ways to create a custom layout in a page using iChurch 5, meaning that your site is pretty much infinitely customisable. So, the two methods are:
They both achieve the same thing, although there are some details you can do with one but not the other – and what’s more, you can combine the two.
The Layout Builder
To use the layout builder, first of all you need to create a new page. Then, look to the top right corner from within the ‘Edit Page’ screen. Here you will see a box that says ‘Page Attributes’. Within that box, you will see a drop-down under the title ‘Template’ – from this dropdown, select ‘Custom Layout’. This will change how your ‘Edit Page’ screen looks! A new area will have appeared at the top, with a button inviting you to ‘Add Section’. Click it – this creates a blank canvas on which you can work to build your page layout (you can experiment with using more than one section in your page, but for the purposes of this explanation, we’ll stick with just one). Once your Section has appeared, you can begin to add elements into it. You do this using the drop-down just above, which says on it ‘Select Element’: open this up and you will see that there are many different types of elements you can use. You will need to spend time experimenting with what each one does; for now, try ‘Columns’ – select this from the drop-down list, and then click the ‘Add Element’ button next to it. You should see a grey box appear within your section. At the right hand end of this little box will be a small triange/arrow – use this to toggle the element open. Within, you will find options to configure various things about how your element displays, and also space to add your content. The element you have selected, ‘Columns’, serves to break up the page into vertical columns, so you can click the ‘Edit Setup’ button to decide how many columns you would like and how to have them distributed (it helps if you think about the page as though it were built on a grid layout). Once you’ve made those decisions, close that bit up by clicking ‘Hide Setup’, and you can then start to put stuff into your columns. You will again see that each column has a drop-down where you can select elements to fill it: you need to choose your element from the list, and then click the little blue ‘+’ sign to add the element. Once it’s there within your column, again, you need to open it up in order to add the content – the place to click in order to open it is the same as before, only for some reason it now has a cog icon on it rather than a triange/arrow – but it works in the same way.
As there are so many options and possible combinations, there really is no short-cut way to learn everything that’s possible to do using the layout builder – the only way is to spend time experimenting with it. Enjoy playing!
Note: if you have selected ‘Custom Layout’ from within Page Attributes, then your page will display the content that you add using the layout builder as described above. This will override any instructions to display a sidebar, and also will ignore any content that is present in the ‘normal’ WYSIWYG editor (‘default template’) set up – although you may discover that there are in fact ways to display that content, including certain elements which allow you to instruct them to display ‘content from current page’.
Shortcodes
The second way to create a custom layout – which can also be used in posts too – is through shortcodes. A shortcode is a shortened bit of code – ie the complicated instructions are already coded into the site’s set-up, so we don’t need to learn how to create them, we only need to learn how to use them. Shortcodes are easily identified as they always sit within square brackets: [like this].
When you are editing a page or post in the iChurch 5 template, you will see, next to the ‘Add Media’ button, another button that says ‘Add Shortcode’. If you click this, a whole new world of possibilities opens up! It brings up a lightbox which gives you many many options as to various shortcodes you can add. The first one that opens is ‘Button’. I would suggest you experiment with this – it gives you options to set a colour, size and other options for your button – you can add icons, tell it where to link to etc etc – and again, I would recommend playing with it to see what happens. You will see that at the top of the dialogue box, there is a [shortcode] in square brackets, which changes as you alter the settings. When you have finished fiddling and click the big blue ‘Insert Shortcode’ button, this shortcode will then appear within your post or page, and if you then save the changes, and view it from the outside, you will be able to see the results. Don’t worry if the first few, or few hundred, go wrong – set yourself up a dummy page where you can simply test things out and find out how the different elements work. You will discover after a while that there are some elements that are on offer as shortcodes that are not available within the Layout Builder – you may also realise that you can place some shortcodes within some other shortcodes if you are careful – just make sure the syntax all stays together, including the opening and closing brackets – these are important in instructing the site the difference between coded stuff and plain text. Then – stepping through the looking glass! – once you get more confident, you can start trying out using shortcodes within elements in the layout builder too!
Galleries are fun, easy and make your images look great on your site. Here’s how to put one in:
Head over to the page or post you want to add the button to, and hit ‘Edit’. Once you’re in the editing pane, click in the body of your content wherever you want the button to be, in order to put the cursor there. Then look out for the ‘Add Shortcode’ button. It looks like this:
Clicking on that will open a lightbox that allows you to select from a list (and then sub-lists) of elements you might like to add to your page or post. Right at the top of the list when you open the box is ‘Button’. This is where you can configure the button of your dreams, then you click ‘Insert’ to add it to the page. In the writing screen it’ll appear as some code enclosed in [ ] – that’s the sign that it’s a shortcode ie it’s telling your site to do tricky stuff but you don’t have to need to know the code to tell it yourself – you can get the shortcode to do it for you. Do have fun experimenting with the buttons – and then with all the other shortcodes. This reveals the real power of the theme framework we’re working on – it gets quite amazing once you realise you can *almost* put anything anywhere!
The truth is, there is no simple answer: SEO can sometimes seem like a dark art, as there are so many factors that influence your ranking.
There is an iChurch helpsheet to guide you in trying to improve your search ranking – you can download it below – and you may also find this video helpful in understanding the basics of how search engines work: https://youtu.be/hF515-0Tduk
hink of Hansel and Gretel….As they walked through the forest, Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs which he might follow to find the route home. Breadcrumbs work similarly on the internet: they sit at the top of the page, showing the path the site visitor has taken to get to where they are. If I was on a ‘Church History’ page on a church website, for instance, which I’d navigated to by going first to the homepage, then to ‘About Us’, and then on to ‘Church History’, the breadcrumbs would sit at the top of the page, showing ‘Home/About Us/Church History’.
This can be particularly helpful in navigating around a very complex site. In most cases, it might not be especially helpful for iChurch sites, as we recommend that you keep your navigation as ‘flat’ as possible (ie only having one level of sub-pages). It will then run the risk of simply looking as though your page has the page title showing twice. However, some sites might want to have breadcrumbs displayed, for whatever reason.
Whether you are Hansel (want breadcrumbs) or Gretel (no breadcrumbs), here’s how to configure whether or not they are displayed:
Open up your preferred browser (we recommend Firefox) and navigate to your site eg http://yoursitename.urc.org.uk. This will bring you to the front page of your site. To log into your dashboard, go back to the address bar at the top of the browser window:
Go to the end of your site address and and add “/wp-admin” (without the inverted commas!). This will bring up the WordPress log-in page. Add your credentials to bring you to your dashboard. Now, hover over the grey bar at the top of the screen, where it says your site name. Right click, and select “Open Link in New Tab”. You will find that you now have a second tab displaying the front-end view of your site (we refer to this as your ‘site view tab’).
This way of working makes life a lot easier once you’ve got the hang of it: you keep the dashboard open in one tab, and this is where you do the work of editing your site. You can then see the results of your work by going to the second tab and either navigating to the page you’re wanting to look at or else hitting Refresh if you’re already viewing that page.