The "Our Stories" Section of Your Congregational Website Using Testimonials
Include a page with stories and photos of people in your congregation and how they found Unitarian Universalism, with some language about how people of many backgrounds follow diverse paths to a UU identity. See the UUA.org People of Many Beliefs page for ideas.
Because this helps prospective members get to know you, this may be one of the pages you feature with a box on your homepage.
Member Testimonials Subpage
This page has stories of people in your congregation, with their pictures. Many congregations have a tradition of adults and youth speaking from the pulpit about their identity as UUs and as members of the congregation, during “pledge season,” coming of age services, youth services, and more.
Congregational History Subpage
You can include a page with the story of your particular congregation’s history. The page might link to other sites’ pages on UU history. Include historical photo(s).
How Testimonial Pages Work
Testimonial pages can be handled by one of two plugins:
- (Recommended) The Jetpack Testimonials, which is part of the Jetpack plugin. Here's a tutorial for configuring and creating Jetpack testimonials.
- The WooThemes Testimonials Plugin, which is no longer supported.
Either one enables you to create as many testimonial pages you want, with one testimonial (or member story) per page.
To display a listing of testimonials on a page, enter this shortcode into the text of the page:
[testimonials] (if you use Jetpack, recommended)
[woothemes_testimonials] (if you use WooThemes and UUA Theme version 1.3.0 or greater)
[uua_testimonials] (if you use UUA Theme version 1.2.2 or less than)
The About > Our Stories page on the demo site shows how this looks.
If you use WooThemes, the homepage can also display one or more testimonials by using the “Testimonials: Member Stories” widget. You can control how many to display and how much of the text to display before showing a link to the testimonial page. If you use Jetpack, you can use the text widget and the [testimonials] shortcode.
Switching from WooThemes to Jetpack Testimonials
The original version of the UUA Theme was designed to use the WooThemes Testimonials Plugin to display testimonials. However, this plugin is no longer maintained, and we recommend that you switch to the Testimonials feature of the Jetpack plugin that you probably already have installed.
If you decide to stick with WooThemes Testimonials, replace the [uua_testimonials] shortcode with [woothemes_testimonials] throughout your site (probably only on the About > Out Stories page).
Here are instructions for switching from WooThemes to Jetpack for displaying testimonials on your congregation’s site.
Displaying Testimonials (with Jetpack)
You can display testimonials anywhere using the [testimonials] shortcode. For example, to display a single random testimonial, enter this in the text of your widget or page:
[testimonials orderby=rand showposts=1]
This excellent article lists other options you can use with this shortcode.
Note: Jetpack automatically creates a page at http://<mydomain>/testimonials that lists all the testimonials.