Feature requests

We're introducing a new feature that gives users more control to choose which information they wish to display on the grid and list view layouts on the archive template. This can help simplify the sermon archive page to display only the information you want.

Every week you pour hours into your sermon, and until now the only number your website gave you back was a bare view count. Insights, coming to Advanced Sermons Pro, changes that. A new dashboard shows you views, audio plays, video plays and downloads for every message, your top sermons and series over any date range, what people search for on your sermon page, and even the searches that came up empty, which are essentially your congregation requesting a future topic. Click into any series and Insights charts engagement part by part, so the question of how long your series should run is finally answered by the people actually listening. Your existing view counts carry over automatically, so there is real data on your dashboard the day you update. We built Insights the way analytics should be built for a church website: no cookies, no visitor tracking, no consent banners, and nothing sent to third parties. All counting happens on your own site as anonymous daily totals, so you learn what serves your congregation without collecting anything about them. Insights ships free with Advanced Sermons Pro in our next release.

Publishing the sermon is only half the job. Someone still has to let the congregation know it's online, and that usually means copying the link, opening Facebook, and pasting it in by hand. The new Share module, coming to Advanced Sermons Pro, puts share buttons for Facebook, X, WhatsApp, and email right in your dashboard. The moment a sermon goes live, they appear alongside the success message, and a share window opens in a couple of clicks. There are no accounts to connect, no API keys, and nothing to set up. A Share box on the sermon editor lets you share older sermons any time, and a copy link button covers everything else, from your church app to a group text. We're also fixing something in the free plugin for everyone. When a sermon link gets shared on social media and no SEO plugin is installed, platforms guess which preview image to use, and they often pick the speaker's photo instead of your sermon artwork. Advanced Sermons will now tell them exactly which image to show: your sermon image first, with your series image as the fallback. If you already run an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math, we stay out of its way entirely. The Share module ships on by default with the option to toggle it off from the Extensions page. If there's a platform your church shares to that we haven't covered, let us know before this ships.

Adding your weekly sermon shouldn't be a pain point for your church. Quick Add, coming to Advanced Sermons Pro, is a new one-screen page that arrives already filled in. The date is set to your next service day, and your speaker, series (at the right week number), campus, and service type all carry over from your last sermon, with everything auto-filled highlighted so you can review it at a glance. Type a title, paste your video link, and hit Publish. The link is filed into the correct video field automatically, whether it's YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, or an embed code. For the weeks that don't follow the pattern, a toggle switches to a blank form for guest speakers and special services, and the full editor is always one click away for fine-tuning. Quick Add ships on by default with the option to toggle it off from the Extensions page, and it works with all of your existing sermons from day one. If there's something that would make your weekly workflow even faster, let us know before this ships.

Sunday mornings are about to get simpler. The new Live addon for Advanced Sermons Pro connects your website to your YouTube channel and handles your livestream page on its own — no one has to touch the site during service. Add the [asp-live] shortcode to any page, set your weekly service times, and it takes care of the rest: visitors see a countdown before service begins, the page switches to your live stream automatically the moment you're broadcasting, and when the stream ends it gracefully falls back to your most recent sermon or a custom message of your choosing. Behind the scenes, the addon watches your channel only around your scheduled service times, detects when your stream actually starts (even when you go live a few minutes early or late), and knows when it ends — so your site is never showing an "offline" player to Monday visitors. It works with your existing YouTube setup, requires no embed-code copying week to week, and styles itself to match your theme. Live ships as part of the 4.0 release for all Advanced Sermons Pro users — just flip it on under Extensions.

As we continue developing Advanced Sermons 4.0, our goal is to make it the most powerful and flexible WordPress plugin for displaying sermons. Today, we’re excited to introduce another new feature coming in version 4.0: the Shortcode Builder. A major focus of Advanced Sermons 4.0 is customization. The new Customizer will give you greater control over the appearance of your sermon content, allowing you to create a design that fits your website without needing to write custom CSS. We have also added a growing collection of new shortcode filters, display settings, and layout options. With so many possibilities available, manually building a shortcode could quickly become complicated. That is where the new Shortcode Builder comes in. Simply choose how you want your sermon content to look and function, and the Shortcode Builder will automatically generate a ready-to-use shortcode. You can then copy and paste it anywhere on your website. Whether you want to adjust the layout, select which filters are available, control what content is displayed, or customize how visitors interact with your sermon archive, the Shortcode Builder makes configuring Advanced Sermons faster and easier than ever.

I'm currently missing the date format most commonly used in Europe: "j. F Y" (Day. Month Year). But what I was really surprised about, is that there is no option to use the default format that was specified in the Wordpress settings. IMO that is the option most people would use.....

With the release of Advanced Sermons 3.0 right around the corner, we're proud to introduce a ton of new features and improvements to Advanced Sermons. One of these improvements is a new import functionality for Sermon Manager. This will allow users to import their existing sermons with a few clicks. Part of this improvement, we are also including a build in export functionality incase users ever need to migrate their data.

We're excited to announce the launch of new Elementor widgets for our Advanced Sermons Pro plugin! These widgets are designed to help you seamlessly integrate sermon-related content into your WordPress site using the powerful Elementor page builder. Whether you're showcasing the latest sermon, displaying an archive, or organizing sermons by speakers or topics, our new widgets make it easier than ever.

Would be awesome to flag a series as complete in the back-end with the result that in the front-end the series would display all the sermons from old to new for easier playback.

We utilize the scripture field (although we do not link to the scripture) and also series features. However, on many occassions there are sermons that are not a part of a series, and if people want to hear a sermon pertaining to a certain scripture but don't remember the title, or the title does not contain any of the same words as the scripture, then I see some benefit to adding the ability to search for sermons based on scriptures entered in the current scripture field when creating the sermon.

Hello, I often use embedded YouTube video's as the source for Sermons or Bible Study messages. I would like to be able to use the YouTube thumbnail image from the video as the "Featured Image" when adding the sermon to my library, and point directly to YouTube's source file rather than downloading and keeping a local copy. I can currently point the featured image to an external source, but then the file gets downloaded and saved, so it doesn't update dynamically if the thumbnail is change on YouTube. Thank you for your consideration.

We’re excited to announce one of the most requested features is finally on it way. Advanced Sermons will now include a built-in podcasting functionality! With this update, you can automatically generate a podcast feed directly from your sermons, making it easier than ever to distribute your messages on platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Whether you're launching a new podcast or syncing your existing sermon archive, this native integration simplifies the entire process, no third-party tools or custom setup required. Stay tuned for more details on how to get started and optimize your feed for maximum reach.