The internet has revolutionized the way we do things. It has changed the way people shop, research, and even get in touch with their religious community. Just like organizations and businesses, churches need to have an online presence to let the world know about their presence and the activities they offer. Many churches may not have the resources to pay designers thousands of dollars to get a theme developed from scratch. These 30 WordPress church themes are fairly affordable and save religious communities time putting their online presence together:

1. WP Church: WP-Church: a highly attractive template for churches and faith communities. It has 8 custom widgets and 6 custom colors. It offers support for Google Maps. A scripture finder is included too.

2. Grace for Church: Grace is a light-color theme for church and christian websites. You can use it for other religious websites as well. You can easily embed your videos. It’s also search engine friendly.

3. Born: Born for WordPress is great looking and highly customizable. You are in control of colors, fonts, and the image showing in the background of your site. It supports 4 custom types (events, videos, audio, galleries).

4. Light of Peace: a versatile theme you can use for your church, wedding event, and everything in between. It takes advantage of jQuery and has multiple page templates.

5. WordPress Church: a very cool looking church theme for WordPress. It’s very flexible and comes social media ready. Best of all you get the PSD files with it as well to further customize the theme.

6. Ecclesia: Ecclesia offers 6 color schemes and an unlimited number of color variations. You also get 18 custom widgets to further customize your site with.

7. Ray of Light: designed for church sites but can be used for other types of religious sites as well. It offers automatic image resizing and an easy to use control panel.

8. Outreach theme: powered by Genesis Framework for WordPress, Outreach is customizable enough for you to use it for your church, non-profit organization, and everything in between.

9. WP-Church: a robust theme that has everything you need to promote your church and its activities. It has automatic scripture finder, 6 color schemes, and 8 custom widgets.

10. Antioch: an image and video friendly theme for churches. It has a simple design but is still great for promoting your upcoming events.

11. WordPress Aid + Charity: you can use WordPress Aid for charity organizations, churches, cause marketing, and other similar purposes. It has donation tracker, call to action, and unlimited color options.

12. Saving Grace: this is an attractive theme for non-profits and those who are raising funds for a noble cause. It has 5 color schemes and a donation bar.

13. Ezekiel theme: a highly customizable theme for WordPress. It has 6 page templates, 4 custom widgets, and is podcast friendly.

14. Moses: designed specifically for churches, this theme lets you add your events and post sermons to your site. It has a HTML5 audio player and 5 color schemes.

15. Mu Theme: this theme comes with multiple styles and backgrounds. It automatically resizes your images and is highly customizable.

16. City Church: City Church is a child theme based on Builder framework. It is highly user friendly and makes adding text and audio content to your site easy.

17. Ambience: Ambience is a dark, very slick theme for your church website. Very flexible and comes with banner management and 5 layouts to choose from.

18. Charity theme: Charity is powered by UpThemes framework. It has an easy to use image slider and a powerful back-end. Uploading your own images to this theme is pretty easy too.

19. Organic Non-Profit Theme: Non-profit has a professional design and is perfect for non-profits, green businesses, and religious sites. It is SEO friendly too.

20. Delta Theme: an easy-to-use and simple theme for churches. Does not have as many bells and whistles as some of the other themes in this list.

21. bChurch: bChurch is a good looking theme for religious WordPress websites. It can handle videos and is social media friendly.

22.Flashlog: Flashlog is a dark theme that you can adopt easily for your church’s website. Comes AJAXified with advanced flash integration.

23. Rebirth: Rebirth is a dynamic theme that provides support for video, audio, event, and gallery type posts. The homepage is highly customizable.

24. True North: True North has 6 custom widgets and nine custom sidebars. The admin panel makes customizing this easier. Google Maps is integrated into this template.

25. Open Air: Open Air is a magazine-type WordPress theme for churches and any other type of religious website. It supports Flickr.

26. Trinity: Trinity for WordPress has a light tone and clean looks. It lets you promote your sermons and other events conveniently.

27. Crossroads: Crossroads has valid HTML5 code. You get custom theme widgets and a side-blog page template. It is social media friendly.

28. Malachi Theme: Malachi is a video-based theme designed specifically for churches and religion-based communities. You get 7 page templates, 4 custom widgets, and 5 custom post types.

29. Calvary: Calvary has a down-to-earth style to it with dark earth tones and textures. It is lightweight and quite fast.

30. Authentic Church: Authentic Church Theme has built-in podcasting capability. It can handle videos very well as well. You get a bunch of custom widgets to further customize your site.

Whether you are looking to set up a church website or use WordPress to create a portal for your mosque, you can do it easily with the above themes. You don’t necessarily have to spend thousands of dollars to start your online presence these days.

Your take: did I miss anything? Please feel free to share your favorite premium church themes below.

WordPress has made developing websites and putting them live online a whole lot easier than before. There are plenty of premium themes available on the market that allow you to go live with your website fast. In most cases, you will have to make some modifications to the underlying code of your theme to customize its look and feel. iThemes Builder Theme aims to change all that. It’s an innovative theme that lets you change the layout and look and feel of your blog fast and create a killer portal for your niche (with many options to choose from).

Here is what’s intriguing about Builder Theme. It’s an all in one solution that would allow you to develop all kinds of websites using your theme. It’s very flexible and makes changing things without writing code easy. Here is a video by the folks at iThemes that explains its functionality:

For those of you interested, iThemes has a long e-seminar on this theme that shows you how you can take advantage of this theme. The theme is obviously not for everyone but if you are looking for a flexible theme for your not-so-certain projects, Builder Theme could come in handy.

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.  If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

Even if you don’t have registered users, you still want to upgrade just to be on the safe side. Make sure you do it as soon as possible to avoid becoming a victim.

The Design Options page is not too different from the previous version, but it’s the place to tackle if you want to change the look and feel of your blog.

Custom File Editor makes it easy to further customize your theme, though you are going to make a small change to one of the files you receive in your installation kit to get it fully working.

Thesis 1.6 is a decent upgrade over the previous version, and I truly believe we are reaching the “golden age” of Thesis. It can only get better from here. Thesis may be a lightweight theme, but it’s hands down the best option to go with if you want to customize and develop your own theme. Keep in mind that you can’t get Thesis 1.6 unless you have a developer license. It can only be downloaded from the developer’s interface at this point, but you can also wait a bit and get it once its released to everyone.

In case you missed it, WordPress 2.8 was released a few days ago and generated a lot of good and bad buzz on the Internet. WordPress 2.8 is another decent upgrade that brings you better theme, plugin, and content management capabilities. But I for one can tell you that it hasn’t been the easiest WordPress to upgrade to. There are a lot of incompatible plugins out there, and that could easily lead to your install breaking if you don’t deactivate these plugins before performing your upgrade. If your plugin is not on WordPress 2.8 compatibility list, there is a chance it may not be compatible with WordPress 2.8. If that’s the case, you need to deactivate it before installing WordPress 2.8. The best way to go about doing is by deactivating all your plugins and activating them one by one to figure out which one’s not compatible. The same process applies to your themes as well.

WordPress 2.8 New Features:

Theme Management:

WordPress 2.8 now comes with everything you need to manage your themes more effectively.

WordPress 2.7 introduced us to better plugin management capability in WordPress back-end. WordPress 2.8 now allows you to browse and manage your themes more effectively. You can use this new feature to find new themes and install them on your blog with a click of a button. What I love about this feature is that you can upload your themes too. That comes handy if you own a premium theme. The theme preview feature has also been improved to make it easier to preview all kinds of themes without you needing to activate them first.

Permalink Management:

Not a big change but you can now easily change your permalink structure from your post page. You can also view your post live with a click of a button.

Coding:

If you are into coding or just want to go through your plugins’ or themes’ code, you are in luck. The new WP 2.8 makes it even easier to go through others’ codes and find out possible errors.

The addition of color coding and function look up is a big plus.

Tag Management:

Tags are now officially categories. At least that’s the way it seems with the new tag management feature in WordPress 2.8. If you have a huge website, you are going to need to manage your tags properly. With the new changes in WP 2.8, it’s all that much easier.

Widget Management:

WordPress 2.8 has gotten a whole new look and feel in the widget management area. Now you can easily add and manage your widgets in the back-end

Improved Screen Options:

The new version now comes with more options to let you manage your screen. This feature allows you to better manage your posts and blog more effectively.

Comment Management:
WordPress 2.8 now makes it easier to manage your comments from your edit page. You can easily delete or approve comments from your edit page. It’s not earth shattering but does save time.

Should you Upgrade to WordPress 2.8

I would usually say yes. But there are a lot of themes and plugins that are not compatible with WordPress 2.8. If your premium theme is not compatible with WordPress 2.8, you can always ask the designer to make the necessary changes. You can’t expect the same with plugins and free themes however. If you can find alternative themes and plugins to replace your incompatible scripts, there is no reason you shouldn’t move to WordPress 2.8.

Your take: how’s been your experience with WordPress 2.8?

Thesis WordPress theme is one of the most popular themes in the WordPress community. It is known for being super SEO friendly, and a lot of super-bloggers use it as a starting point for their blogs (see an example here). Thesis is an extremely clean, simple, and yet powerful theme for all bloggers and those interested in starting their very first blog.

Thesis is a three column premium theme (content + 2 – column sidebar). You can modify the theme easily to have the column show on the right or left side of the content. The theme is coded in PHP + HTML + CSS, but the developers have kept SEO as their high priority. What I like about this theme is the contrast of colors in the design. Have you ever been to a blog that you really like but hurts your eyes badly every time you try to read it? That’s not what you get with Thesis.

Thesis theme has a lot of real estate for ads, if you are interested in monetizing you blog. You can also customize the headers as you wish, which means you don’t have to create a blog with this theme. You can even use Thesis for your corporate site.

In summary, here is why many super bloggers are using Thesis:

• Design: Thesis is simple and intuitive. Things are where they are supposed to be.
• Flexibility: there are lots of ways to customize your Thesis-based WordPress blogs.
• SEO: the folks behind this theme have taken time to optimize the code for search engines. Who doesn’t like free traffic?
• Accessibility & Usability: Thesis designers have paid extra attention to web usability and accessibility. It doesn’t take a genius to navigate through Thesis blogs.
• Layout: Thesis’ layout is highly customizable. You don’t have to be a coding genius to change things around.
• Cross-browser Compatibility: your Thesis blog is going to show up right on top browsers such as IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
• Lifetime Updates: Thesis comes with lifetime updates. That means you won’t have to spend a time to get your hands on updates done to this theme.
• Support: if you are stuck, you can always count on the folks behind Thesis to help you out.
• Affordable: for a such a sophisticated theme, Thesis is actually under-priced. $87 is not a lot for such a well-designed premium theme.

You can get your hands on Thesis for $87 but you will have to leave the footer intact and use it on only one site. You can get a professional license  for $164, but you get to use it on multiple sites, and you can remove the footer. If you are looking for a killer WordPress theme, you won’t go wrong with Thesis.

Thank God for WordPress making it so easy to update. It takes only a click. Here is the list of changes from 2.7 to 2.7.1.

Great news folks. The good people behind WordPress have now launched WordPress.tv to help the WordPress community enjoy a better WP experience. You can find WordPress installation guides and all kinds of goodies on WordPress.tv. And let’s not forget about WordCampTV. That’s the place to catch various footages from Wordcamp events.

This is a great idea by WordPress to make the WP community even stronger. Now, you can have access to tutorials and everything you need to set up your own WordPress blog. And those Wordcamp presentations are priceless.  Well done guys!

The good folks at FreebiesDock.com have released a cool free WordPress theme to those who are looking for a new theme in 2009. Here is what you get with Freemium:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• jQuery menu
• quick submitting to web2.0 websites support
• flickrRSS plugin support
• threaded comments support
• feedBurner subscribe via email support
• a lot of advertising spots (125×125, 120×600, 300×250)
• 2 widget ready sidebars
• free for commercial & non-commercial use

You can download it here. Don’t forget to share your experiences here.