New Features of ModernEkklesia.com

April 15, 2010 in modernekklesia with 1 Comment

I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the new features of ModernEkklesia, so you can know what’s going on, and why we moved over to WordPress.

1. Along the top right of the black bar we have some places where you can subscribe and connect. So there’s a link to subscribe via email, rss, or connect through Twitter.

2. Along the right sidebar are some graphics of a few things. The first is of Standard Theme. That’s the WordPress theme we’re using on ModernEkklesia now. Below that are a couple of essential “apps” of ChurchMetrics.com and YouVersion.com. Below that you’ll see ”Recent Posts” and “Most Popular Posts” that are automatically generated.

3. The “Blast From the Past” tab is an archive of all the posts ever written. So you can click on a month, and all the posts for that month will appear.

4. At the bottom of each post is something called “Related Posts.” They are also automatically generated based upon the content of each post. This is a pretty nice feature.

Those are some of the most obvious things. Under the hood there are some that are quite important as well.

1. Size of pictures. I can include pictures that are really large and scale them to any size I want. With this, I can assure that the pictures are always formatted to look nice and tidy on the post.

2. Upload any content. Since this is a self-hosted blog, I can upload documents, videos, or resources to this site, and make them available for download. This feature is not available on blogger.

3. Mobile viewing. We also added a plugin so it’s mobile viewing ready. If you access the site from your iPhone, Blackberry, or other device it will automatically resize the posts for you in a way that will load very quickly. This plugin has been around for awhile, but I’m excited we finally got it on ModernEkklesia.

There are quite a few other technical features, but I don’t want to bore you with some of the details.

A few posts from now I’ll describe what the process was actually like for me to move from Blogger to WordPress, and what advice I’d give to those contemplating the move. I’ll just say ahead of time that it wasn’t easy by a mile.

Hope you enjoy some of the new features!