As less and less people carry cash, accepting donations and tithes through your church website is becoming extremely important in the 21st century.

That is why we are delighted that we can now offer a church-focused recurring donation system as part of our Theme Bundles. This is done through a plugin called “Church Tithe WP”, which solves all of the difficulties you typically run into.

Normally, setting up a system like this is often either complex and/or expensive to get started. It’s also difficult to find a system that doesn’t require your website’s users to leave your website in order to complete their transaction.

But with Church Tithe WP, not only can you get started for free, but their 1% transaction fee is removed after you’ve earned $20,000 through the plugin per year.

All of our Church Theme Bundles now include the Church Tithe WP plugin, and a dedicated “Online Giving” page with the donation form beautifully placed.

Church Tithe WP uses Stripe.com to process credit card transactions, which is the definitive leader in safe and secure online transactions. Your users will simply use the donation form right on your website, and never have to leave. They can also log in at any time to cancel a recurring plan, or update their credit card details. You are protected because their information is actually never saved to your server. It all goes directly to-and-through Stripe.com’s extremely secure system.

And because it is part of our Theme Bundles, you get full support from us to ensure any difficulties you have get resolved. We stand behind everything in our theme bundles 100%.

Allowing our users to move to a different theme in the future is very important to us. Whether that’s one of our competitors, or even if you want to switch to another theme we’ve created, we want you to be free and flexible to do that without losing any of your hard work.

That’s why we separated all of our theme’s features into separate plugins, and why those plugins are automatically installed and set up for you upon installation.

Plugins like to travel.

Plugins can travel with your website forever, regardless of the theme you choose to use. Themes, on the other hand, cannot, as you can only ever have 1 theme installed at a time.

An easy way to think about it is like this:

Themes should deal with “how things look“.
Plugins should deal with “how things work“.

This is why we call our themes “Theme Bundles”. You’re not just buying a theme, but a bundle including our very best plugins, all made in-house by us, and all of it works with-or-without the theme itself.

What is WordPress “Theme Lock”?

“Theme Lock” is a problem that arose with the popularity of WordPress Themes, where themes started promising and including features, but built those features directly into the theme itself.

WordPress Themes, at their conception, were never intended to include “features”, but only affect the style and design of the page. But style and design are very closely linked with features. After all, how can you style a feature (like an event page), if no event page exists? Because of this, themes started bundling code for features like events, MP3 players, sermons, and other content, right into the theme.

The big problem nobody saw coming was that if you ever want to move to a new theme, you would lose all of your features! Your events, your MP3 Player, your sermons, and other other theme-powered content will simply disappear when you switch themes.

Because of that, people end up being “stuck” with their theme, unable to change it and get a fresh, new design, even years after their original purchase. This is where the term “Theme Lock” comes from. You become “locked” to your theme.

This is why we’ve architected our products to work the way they do. Preventing theme lock takes a very intentional and well-thought out vision and architecture from the very start, and it’s what you get with any of the themes we make.

We know how frustrating it is to buy a theme, get it installed, and have it look nothing like the demo you saw before purchasing. You’re left with a “now what?” feeling as you scramble to read documentation to find out how to even get started.

How Mint Themes is different:

The Mint Themes approach to WordPress themes is a bit different than your normal run-of-the-mill WordPress Theme. It not only includes a theme with a beautiful design, it also includes a lot plugins we’ve created, to power the functionality of your website, and all of the demo content found in our theme demos.

Taking this approach is how we prevent “Theme Lock”, which is a big problem with any theme that builds its functionality directly into the theme itself (more on that here).

But while that solves the Theme Lock problem, it didn’t solve the “now what?” problem. That’s when we decided to build our “1 click” installation system.

Setting up tons of plugins and content takes hours seconds.

What would normally take you hours and hours of work to set up, now is done in 1 single click. This is something we decided was a requirement early on with our product development, and it’s one of the major things that makes us different.

When you click the “Activate” button, our installation system gets to work, installing all of the required plugins we’ve built (like our Sermon Management system and Event Management system), and even creates the pages for you, completely with each beautifully designed template, and all of the demo content you saw.

No more “now what?” feelings.

Once the installation is complete, boom, it’s all there. Your home page, your events page, all of it. And it’s all ready for you to customize as well!

We never want you to have that “now what” feeling. Instead, we want you to get excited about the possibilities of your new website.

We hear from our customers all the time, where they let us know just how much they appreciate our 1 Click installation system, and how easy it was for them to customize their website.

Many WordPress themes will show great images and content in their theme demos, but after you install the theme, it looks nothing like the demo. This can be very frustrating.

We wanted to be different. That’s why all of the content you see in our Theme Demos is included with the Theme Bundle. That means you don’t have to go on a hunt for good photography. We only use images we have a license to distribute to you.

Sometimes that means we’ve taken our own photos in-house, and sometimes we use photos from photographers who have the proper licensing for WordPress Themes (A GPL friendly license).

Not just included, but placed as well!

We didn’t want to just give you the images though. We also wanted to make sure that the theme you install looks EXACTLY like the demo on our website. That means the images aren’t just buried in a folder somewhere, but they are automagically placed right onto the pages, and those pages are automatically created for you.

This literally cuts hours off of your set-up time, and gets you right into building your website, right away.

This is all part of the ethos we use when building and designing our themes bundles.

For our theme bundles, it was very important to get event management right. Making sure that your users see the right events at the right time, and in a beautiful way, is both a science and an art.

Creating recurring events is one of the biggest needs for churches, who often run events on weekly or monthly basis. That’s why we made sure our event management system included the ability to post recurring events, which is a huge time saver!

When an event has passed, it is automatically hidden from your website. This removes a whole pile of work for you, and also ensures your users only see event information that is valuable to them today.

We developed our own Event management plugin, and a separate display layer plugin to go with it. These plugins, like all of our plugins, can be used with any theme, and are part of how we prevent theme lock.

Creating Events

Event creation is done through our Event Management plugin called “MP Events”. This allows you to post new events right from your WordPress dashboard. Simply go to “Dashboard” > “MP Events” > “Add New”.