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It’s been a long pandemic and your online archive of worship videos is probably getting a little unruly. In this webmaster class, we are going to show you how to use the Worship Times Publications tool to get your videos sorted and easy to manage.

For a church, a publication may be a sermon PDF, sermon video, sermon audio, or bulletins, newsletters, session minutes, committee meeting minutes. But then for church governing bodies, obviously that would be different, like committee resources or meeting documents. Basically, though, publications are a way to organize specific types of content.

If you have a lot of videos sitting on a single page on your website, you can use the Publications tool to clean them up and better organize them.

The first step is to start creating publications. Click New Publication, add a descriptive title, add the actual date of the publication (and if it’s something that doesn’t have a date, select today’s date), and add a short description.

Add links to your PDF, MP3, and/or video. So that you don’t slow down your site or quickly eat through your website storage quote, we highly recommend storing larger files, especially MP3s and videos on an external storage system, like Amazon S3. Large PDFs and MP3s are great candidates for uploading to Amazon S3, and videos can be stored on YouTube or Vimeo. Copy the link to your file or video, and paste it in the corresponding field.

Select a Publication Type and an Author, as needed. Publication Types are how your publications get displayed on your website in a list.

Publish.

To add these publications as a list to a page, edit or create a page. Click on Add Media. Select your Publication Type, the amount of publications to display, sort order, and other options. Insert Publication List, which will add a shortcode to your page.

Now that it’s displayed on a page, anytime we add a new publication to this Publication Type, it will automatically display in this list. If you’d like your publications to be displayed differently, submit a support ticket or email us at support@worshiptimes.org, and we can contract with you for custom development work.

You can also add publication lists as a widget on your home page, sidebar, or footer.

You can also set up your publications or a Publication Type as a podcast. Go to to your Podcast Settings, under Publications, and fill out the information. On your publication, check the Add to Podcast, and then add the details needed.

This tool then creates RSS feeds that you would give to iTunes or your podcasting service, whatever it may be. The feed automatically gets updated every time you save a new publication and click on Add to Podcast.

As always, if you have any questions, please submit a support ticket from your website or email us at support@worshiptimes.org.