The UUA Services Plugin: Part of the UUA WordPress Theme for Congregations

Part of Documentation

The UUA Services plugin is packaged with the UUA Theme download. To install and activate it, see step 4 on Installing the Plugins Required by the UUA WordPress Theme for Congregations.

What the UUA Services Plugin Does

We wanted to be sure to offer an integrated way to handle services (Sunday morning or other services), arguably the most active parts of a congregational site, with the UUA Theme. The UUA Services Plugin does the following:

  1. Creates a custom post type for Services
  2. Creates two custom taxonomies for grouping Services (Speaker and Topics)
  3. Adds two widgets:
    • UUA Featured Upcoming Service – used on the front page of the site to showcase the next upcoming service along with some quick links.
    • UUA Upcoming Service – displays an upcoming service. Used in the footer, sidebars or on the homepage.
  4. Adds a shortcode that you can include on pages to display service information:
    • [uua_services] – list the upcoming services, along with speaker and description.
    • [uua_services type="archive"] – list an archive of past services, with most recent services first.

(The [upcoming_services] and [service_archive] shortcodes used in earlier versions of the plugin continue to work, but we recommend switching to the new [uua_services] shortcode when it is implemented.)

How to Use the UUA Services Plugin

  1. Add your regular worship leaders’ names under Services > Speakers.
  2. Add some upcoming services under Services > Add New. See "How Services Pages Work" for instructions.
  3. Add some past services under Services > Add New. Be sure to indicate the date and time of the service so that it will show up under Past Worship Services on your website. For past services, you can add the text of the sermon, audio recordings, video recordings, or a picture. Add the text in the text box, and click Add Media to add an .mp3, .mp4, or .jpg of the service. If you podcast, see below for information about the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, which integrates well with the UUA Services Plugin.

The plug-in automatically moves services from Future to Past when they have occurred. Be sure that your site’s settings use your congregation’s local time zone so it will do this accurately. (Go to Settings in the administrative dashboard to change the time.)

Podcasting

After reviewing the demand and the level of development necessary to maintain podcasts within the Services metadata, we decided that it would be preferable to instead recommend the use of the very effective Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, which allows us to attach podcasting functionality to the Services without having to build and maintain that functionality ourselves.