Exodus is another Church WordPress theme from churchthemes.com. This theme is responsive and retina ready to devices ranging from desktops, laptops, tablets to mobile phones including iPads, iPhones, etc. On activating this theme you get a huge set of theme options which will let you customize every minute detail of theme directly from dashboard without touching a single line of code.
Exodus is capable of almost all features required for a church theme. These features includes sermons page with text, audio and video content, events page with monthly calendar, recurrence, categories, maps and directions, locations show one or multiple, and profiles of staff and leaders. Other features of this theme are as follows:
It supports custom homepage option means you can choose your own layout for homepage with elements like slides, intro, highlights, and your favorite widgets.
You get 4 Custom post types namely Sermons, Events, People and Locations
Easy navigation on sermons by topic, series, book, speaker and month.
Events page layout: show events in calendar and list formats. You can make them recur weekly, monthly or yearly, use categories, maps and directions.
Several widgets for sermons, events, locations, people, galleries, giving, books, and more.
It supports breadcrumbs for better navigation.
It is a localization ready or say translation ready theme.
It also supports child theme.
Sample content included for ready to use demos.
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Expert Review
WordPress has grown up so fast and vast that whichever website you want to create just think of the relevant theme category, type it on Search engine and you will get a full-fledged list of themes in few clicks. There are plenty of theme clubs and theme developers across the world making awesome themes for passionate theme users. I am one of them! I love searching and using different types of themes. This time I was searching for WordPress Church related themes and found “EXODUS“. Here is my short review on this theme.
Design:
Exodus is built in such a way that it will meet all needs of a Church website. The theme has option to choose between two color schemes namely light & dark. Supports google fonts, several options for header settings like search, second menu, latest events, sermons or posts, tagline, custom content, etc., breadcrumbs supported for better navigation. So design and look wise this theme is awesome. It comes with plenty of options and is great theme for developers that have great sense of designing as well.
Ease of Customization:
On activating this theme you get a notice to install Church Theme Content plugin. Activate it and you will be ready to go with this theme. You will get all its customizing options in Appearance => Customize. All the options in live customizer is an indication that it follows all new WordPress standards. Then you get 4 Custom post types namely Sermons, Events, People and Locations. Sermons custom post type has 5 taxonomies for sermon page namely Topics, Books, Series, speakers and sermon tags. Here is a brief description of all the theme options, customizer options:
Live Customizer options – Exodus
Colors and Styling options – Exodus
Google Fonts options – Exodus
Header and Logo options 1 – Exodus
Header and Logo options 2 – Exodus
Social Media Icons options – Exodus
Top Bar options – Exodus
Page and Post options:
Exodus – Widgets and Widgetized areas (sidebars)
Exodus – Sermon post options
Exodus – Person post options
Exodus – Page options and templates
Exodus – Location post options
Exodus – Event post options
Colors & Styling: Change color schemes, main colors, link colors, etc.
Google fonts: Change logo font, tagline font, menu font, heading font, body fonts and apply character sets.
Top bar: There is a top most bar position in theme structure where you can show/hide options listed in these settings. It gives you option to choose upcoming events, latest sermons, latest posts, tagline, custom content or nothing to show on top bar. Also you can choose top bar content position from here.
Header logo: Choose logo type – image/text, logo text custom box, logo text size, show something on right of logo, Show breadcrumb path on subpages, etc.
Social media icons: Show social media icons in header and footer by putting urls in the text boxes given here.
Homepage slider: Make it auto or manual and change transition time from here.
Widgets: It provides you with several widgets like CT archives(Monthly archive for chosen post type), CT categories(Shows categories of various types), CT events(Shows upcoming or past events), CT galleries(Shows list of gallery pages), CT gallery(Shows gallery thumbnails), CT giving (Shows a message and button), CT highlight(Shows a highlight), CT locations(Shows church location(s)), CT People(Shows people according to options), CT Posts(Shows blog posts according to options), CT Sermons, CT slide(A slide to be shown in a slider).
Widgetized areas(sidebars):
Homepage slider – Add CT slide widget to add slides to this slider. It allows you to add image and video as well.
Homepage highlights – Add widgets here to show on the homepage below slider and intro.
Homepage bottom left – These show at the bottom-left of the homepage.
Homepage bottom right – These show at the bottom-right of the homepage.
Page sidebar – These widgets show on the side of pages using the default template.
Sermons sidebar – These widgets show on the side of sermon pages.
Events sidebar – These widgets show on the side of event pages.
People sidebar – These widgets show on the side of people pages.
Locations sidebar – These widgets show on the side of locations content.
Gallery sidebar – These widgets show on the side of gallery pages.
Blog sidebar – These widgets show on the side of blog content.
Contact sidebar – These widgets show on the side of the contact page.
Search sidebar – These widgets show on the side of search results.
Responsiveness:
This theme is 100% responsive and retina ready to all devices ranging from desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones to iPads, iPhones. The content gets automatically adjusted according to the screen size it is being viewed upon.
Exodus – Gallery on Tablet portrait version
Exodus – Mobile menu portrait version
Exodus – Mobile portrait version
Exodus – Sermons archive on Mobile landscape version
Page load speed:
A Church website may contain lot of heavy content and media like images, audios, video, pdf files. This may impact the page load speed. The PageSpeed score depends on the demo page content, caching of the page, number of HTTP requests, Image sizes and lot many other parameters. I checked the Google PageSpeed of EXODUS official demo on Mobile and Desktop mode. The Performance is not impressive on both the devices. It is recommended to use W3 Total Cache and WP Super cache plugins for speeding up sites.
[visualizer id=”23610″]
Search Engine Optimization:
Basic search engine optimization is done such as,
On Single Post, the title is in <H1> tag
In-built breadcrumbs available for better navigation for Search bot.
It is advised to use Yoast SEO WordPress plugin for even better SEO for the site.
Theme Authenticity:
I have scanned this theme with TAC plugin for authenticity and with Theme Check plugin for WordPress standards of theme code, the result is as shown below:
Exodus – TAC result
Exodus – Theme Checker result
This theme has passed TAC test but theme checker has given lot of warnings which needs to be resolved.
Support and help:
Support by churchthemes.com is for a period of one year from date of purchase of theme. Email support is also provided by them for one on one communication. It provides a set of guides and video tutorials to build site with churchthemes.com.
