Congregate for WordPress
Congregate is excited to announce support for WordPress websites, allowing your Congregate-powered content to be seamlessly integrated within a WordPress site easily and securely.
Whether self-hosted or through our WordPress hosting package, Congregate for WordPress allows your Congregate public and member content to be integrated into your site.
This means you can use virtually any theme and various page builders to fully customize your church website, all while continuing to use Congregate Admin to manage your church-related content.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Congregate for WordPress is a plugin installed on your self- or Congregate-hosted WordPress website. The plugin allows public and member data and modules to then appear on your website. The Congregate for WordPress plugin requires an active WordPress-enabled Congregate service plan.
All of your Congregate-powered content – such as sermons, articles, membership directory, worship assignments, etc. – is still managed in Congregate Admin. No Congregate admin accounts will change or need to be updated in any way.
Congregate and WordPress are both do-it-yourself platforms, allowing you to use our built-in tools to populate or import content. However, if you wish to have our team handle the migration of any non-Congregate-powered content (i.e., any user-added pages), we offer migration and design services. Contact us for a free quote.
Yes, you can! Congregate for WordPress is compatible with nearly any theme, page builder, or other plugin(s). This includes popular page builders, such as Elementor.
Yes! If you’re looking for a custom-designed site, layout, functionality, etc., our team of designers and developers have developed hundreds of WordPress sites. We are pleased to offer full website construction and design services. Contact us for a free quote.
No, you sure don’t. Once your WordPress site is initially configured, you’ll only need to use it to manage your navigation menu, theme/design, and non-Congregate-powered pages. Those tasks are very easy to do in WordPress. Furthermore, as the most popular CMS in the world, you can easily find videos and documentation online covering every single aspect of the platform. Remember, your “day-to-day” updates will continue to be done through Congregate Admin and not WordPress.
Since you’ll be using WordPress as your website CMS (instead of Congregate’s page manager, widgets, and templates), all of those aspects are managed in WordPress. You’ll use WordPress’s “Pages” to create and edit pages. You’ll use “Menus” to create and edit your navigation menu(s). You’ll use “Themes” to download and select one of thousands of themes for your site.
Let’s say you wish to display all of your uploaded sermons on your website. Since that’s a Congregate-powered module, the sermons would all be managed in Congregate Admin like usual. Let’s say you also want to add a basic page called “About Us” that has a photo and text. Since those items are not Congregate-powered, you would need to create and edit that page and its content using WordPress. With page builders and layout designers, building a custom page in WordPress couldn’t be easier.
Congregate Admin accounts and member user accounts all remain the same. Members will log in using the same username and password, even on the members-only section of your WordPress site. Congregate admins will continue to log in to Congregate Admin using their same usernames and passwords. However, new WordPress admin account(s) would be necessary to access WordPress’s backend to edit anything not powered by Congregate. You can create any number of WordPress admin accounts.
Easily Integrate Congregate Content
With Congregate for WordPress, you can easily embed your public sermons, articles, calendar, etc., onto your current WordPress website. Matching your theme’s colors and fonts, your Congregate-powered content will fit perfectly into your pre-existing site’s design. Congregate for WordPress is compatible with virtually any WordPress theme and is fully mobile responsive for viewing on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
Member modules and pages are password-protected and secure. You can choose to use or not use any of Congregate’s public and member modules, in addition to any of your own custom public or member-only pages.
Easy Setup and Configuration
To display Congregate-powered content on your WordPress site, simply click “edit” on any given page and then select the corresponding Congregate content you wish to have appear (such as sermons, articles, calendar, member directory, worship assignments, etc.)
The Congregate content is then automatically injected after your existing page content (if any). This means in addition to your own custom pages, you can add custom content on the same pages that display Congregate-powered content.
Search Engine Ready
The Congregate for WordPress plugin updates your WordPress sitemap to include all your public Congregate-powered content. It’s also completely compatible with the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast.
This means Google and other search engines can find all your public sermons, articles, events, etc. Your website’s sitemap is re-indexed nightly, so it’s always up-to-date.
WordPress Widgets
Use the included recent sermons (list and thumbnail carousel), recent articles, recent news, and upcoming events widgets and place them anywhere on your site where WordPress widgets are supported. You can even select the number of items displayed per widget.
Even More Customization
Even with the ability to integrate into virtually any WordPress theme and various page builders, you can further customize your Congregate-powered content using targeted CSS rules for full control over the display and user experience.
Data Protection and Security
Member data cannot be viewed inside WordPress itself, and members’ user accounts are in no way affiliated or integrated with WordPress’s user accounts. For member protection, the user is taken to a Congregate-hosted SSO (single sign-on) page in order to authenticate on our server – not yours and not through WordPress.
Even if your self-hosted WordPress site is prone to an attack, malware, etc., your member data, accounts, and logins are completely separate and apart from your WordPress site and will not be compromised in any way.