View this site live at firstchurch.net, and view the code on GitHub.
A Child Theme of Pro
Hi there! This theme was built by K.J. Roelke during his time at First Methodist Carrollton. It is a child of Pro Theme and is specifically meant for this organiztion.
Background
Initially published in the summer of 2022 after KJ took over the Communications Director position, this theme is specificially meant to act similarly to an “out-of-the-box” WordPress solution. The website was migrated away from an Ekklesia360 site because that site builder, while designed specifically for churches, was too restrictive to do anything actually useful beyond posting simple content.
While I believe Ekklesia is a fine CMS and web builder, I decided migrate because WordPress is more ubiquitous and I believed I could make a highly specialized theme for the church. Pro Theme can be highly customized and extended (even at a code-base level) upon install, but I still felt that I should abstract away certain styles or functions in case the person after me was familiar with WordPress as a CMS but wasn’t a super-knowledgeable Full Stack WordPress Developer (as is often the case with Communications Directors/Managers/Coordinators).
Child Theme Specs
Custom JS
utilities.js- The copyright in the Footer uses a simple IIFE to keep the year up-to-date.
- Some simple selector functions to make Vanilla JS a little easier on my fingers.
hub.js- Our Central Hub (/hub) needed to show/hide a section of content based on whether or not the current Day was Sunday. So I wrote a quick function to do that because something with Pro Theme’s Conditions wasn’t working right (I suspect it is a caching issue).
jobs.js- Essentially, the same idea as
hub.js, except it is used to hide thearchive-jobstemplate (since that template is, apparently, based on Pro Theme’s Content / Sidebar Right layout)- I might upload a new php file to handle this…I just wrote a quick
jsfile because I was already writingjsfiles.
- I might upload a new php file to handle this…I just wrote a quick
- Essentially, the same idea as
Custom CSS (SCSS)
This mostly exists so I could reset some annoying quirks of Pro Theme and have it abstracted away. There’s more CSS in the theme’s Global CSS section, but some of this I wanted to feel “default to the theme” so I hid it away in the Child theme.
Questions or Comments?
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to chat about this. Or drop a comment on the repo? I’m not really sure how Github works (socially) to be honest…