Sermon Audio & WordPress Integration

SermonAudio.com is the largest and probably the best known audio streaming service for MP3 audio sermons from conservative churches and ministries worldwide. With a whole suite of tools for churches to store, broadcast and deliver their message online Sermon Audio would seem to be the ideal solution for any church to have an online outreach.

Unfortunately, there is a slight problem for churches with their own WordPress based websites —  repetition of labor because there isn’t a Sermon Audio Plugin for WordPress. Basically, if you want to list sermons on your own website you will have to list the sermon details on the website and in the Sermon Audio website. While there are options to using Sermon Audio, they have their drawbacks when it comes to backing up your sermon files, storage space and bandwidth requirements.

For example you could use the Sermon Browser Plugin and store the audio files on your own website; that would require that you have a hosting plan which can handle the storage, bandwidth and server load needed to deliver a minimum of 52 sermons a year. In a smaller church that might not be such a thing, but in a larger church with more people simultaneously accessing your sermon files it could get expensive compared to Sermon Audio’s low monthly rate.

Not to mention that, after a couple of years, those audio files start to take up a bit of storage space and maintaining backups becomes more difficult. Most hosting companies will restore a website for you at a minimal cost, or allow you to backup your site in a gzip file that they can restore for you at no cost. Since hosting companies have large numbers of websites to maintain, it’s not feasible for them to maintain backups that go back more than a few days at most; sometimes a restored website will have the same issues that were meant to be corrected by restoring the backup. If you decide to backup the site yourself, you will likely need to invest heavily in flash drives as the gzip files can easily exceed the storage capacity of a DVD or Blue Ray.

This brings us full circle, how to have your sermons on your own website and not have to send people to Sermon Audio without duplicating your effort? The Sermon Browser Plugin is pretty awesome, but just like Sermon Audio, you will need to fill out the sermon title, the sermon giver, any supporting materials, so that’s out.

 Integrate & Automate Sermon Audio and Your WordPress Website

 Since we’ve established the benefits of using Sermon Audio and we know that there isn’t a direct plugin for it, let’s think outside of the box. By using the functionality that Sermon Audio provides in conjunction with a couple of unrelated WordPress Plugins we can actually automate updating a church’s WordPress based website (the basic principles can be used on other types of websites as well).

There are a couple of options to automate WordPress with your Sermon Audio account that can be used independently or in conjunction. The first is to use the Sermon Audio widget  and force it to work with WordPress the second is to use the Sermon Audio RSS Feed for your Church and have it generate posts for each sermon added to the feed.

Integrating Sermon Audio Widget and WordPress

There are basically four ways to integrate the widget with WordPress:

1. Create a page that looks like your website and insert the widget code
   — Way to much work
     
2. Code the widget directly into your WordPress theme
   — Still way to much work
    
3. Upload the widget to your website and use an inline frame to load it
   — Fairly easily done with the IFrame Embedder plugin
   1. Get the Widget Code from Sermon Audio.
   2. Paste the widget code into a text file and upload it to the root web directory of your website, then rename the file to something like “sermon.php“.
   3. In the admin menu under “Settings” choose the settings you want to use with IFrame Embedder; the default settings should be fine for most people.
   4. Copy the shortcode sample from the settings page and paste it into a new page or post.
   5. Edit the shortcode to display the url to your sermon.php file and the height and width to fit within your WordPress theme. 
        
4. Place widget code directly in your page/post
   — What’s easier than simply pasting the code into your page or post?
   1. Open/Create the post/Page you want to place the Sermon Audio Widget on.
   2. Click on the HTML tab in the MCE Editor
   3. Paste in the Sermon Audio Widget Code
   4. * Important! Always Save/Update or Publish while on the HTML tab; doing so while on the Visual tab could result in your Sermon Audio Code widget breaking.

 Integrating Sermon Audio RSS Feed and WordPress

Using the Sermon Audio RSS Feed with the RSS Plugin FeedWordPress is a bit more difficult than simply using the widget, but it’s well worth the trouble for the SEO value. Basically, FeedWordPress will create a post with the information from your RSS feed in your predefined categories with your predefined tags. 

Installing FeedWordPress is simple enough, but configuration is a bit more complex than this article has room for. Keeping it simple: 

1. Configure your RSS Feed by replacing “USERNAME in the following code with your Sermon Audio Username; for more Feed options log into Sermon Audio.
   http://www.sermonaudio.com/rss_source.rss?sourceid=USERNAME&filter=mp3
     
2. Add the feed to FeedWordPress and specify your publishing options.

Using Sermon Audio RSS Feed Or Widget Integration With WP

Which method of WordPress integration is ideal for your church depends upon your website and congregations needs. The Widget can be installed much more quickly and presents an aesthetically pleasing interface to browse your sermons. On the other hand, using the RSS Feed will have more SEO value.

Perhaps both methods have value for your church;

if that’s the case — use both!