Churches · A Squarespace plugin
Sermon Shelf
Your sermons blog, browsable by series, by book of the Bible and by speaker.
Turns the sermons blog you already keep into a library with a series grid, a shelf of all 66 books, speakers and passage-aware search. The player remembers where each listener stopped.
- All 66 books, lit where you’ve preached
- Your series artwork, in a proper grid
- Search that knows the Bible
Live demo
Try it on a website that doesn’t exist.
Harbourlight is made up, but the plugin is the real thing, running the way it would on your site. Switch the section colours to see it take on a different look.
On your site it picks up your own fonts, colours and button shape.
All 66 books, lit where you’ve preached
Each spine is sized by the book’s real length, so Psalms is thick and Obadiah is thin. Open a book and its sermons sit in chapter order, with a strip showing which chapters you’ve covered.
Your series artwork, in a proper grid
Covers come from the thumbnails you already upload. A series opens from its first sermon, with a button to listen from the start.
Search that knows the Bible
“Romans 8” finds Romans 8:18–39 and leaves out Romans 12:1–8. Abbreviations work too, like Ps 23, 1 Cor 13 and Jn 3:16.
A player that remembers
Skip back 15 seconds or forward 30, change the speed, use the lock screen. Leave halfway and it picks up where you stopped, with a progress line on the sermon.
Quick, even with a big archive
The newest sermons show in about a second and the rest of the archive loads in the background, years at a time. I tested it on a real archive of more than 700 sermons.
It tells you what to tag
Add ?shelf=check to the page address and you’ll see what it found and what to fill in. Tabs with nothing to show hide themselves until you do.
Install
One paste and about ten minutes.
The download includes a step-by-step guide written for whoever looks after your website. Read it before you buy.
Add a Code block to the page where you want the library and paste in the one file from the download.
Change /sermons to your sermons blog’s address. That’s the only setting you have to touch.
Save and open the page, then add ?shelf=check to the address to see what it found.
What you need: A Squarespace plan that runs JavaScript (Core, Plus or Advanced, or the older Business and Commerce plans) and your sermons in a public blog.
Pricing
Paid for once, and yours to keep.
A single payment with every 1.x update included. The unlimited licence is for designers and agencies who build sites for clients.
Single site
$49USD, once
For one website.
- Use it on every page of one site
- All 1.x updates by email
- Install guide and email help
- Email me if it’s not working on your site
Unlimited sites
$129USD, once
For designers and agencies.
- Use it on as many sites as you build or look after
- Clients keep it when your work ends
- All 1.x updates by email
- Email me if it’s not working on a site
Want all 6? The whole library is US$129 for one site, which is US$85 less than buying them one at a time. Prefer it done for you? I’ll install and set up any plugin on your site for US$79, including tagging a first batch of content so it looks full on day one.
See the bundlePrices are in US dollars. Checkout shows your local currency and adds any tax that applies where you are.
Questions
The questions people ask first.
Do we have to change how we post sermons?
No. It reads the blog posts you already have. A category for each series, the passage in the title or a “Scripture:” tag, and the speaker’s name in the audio block make it richer, and the setup check tells you exactly what’s missing.
Our sermons are on YouTube. Does that work?
If each sermon has a blog post with the YouTube or Vimeo video in it, the shelf shows a Watch link for it. The built-in player plays audio from a Squarespace audio block or a linked MP3.
Will it slow our site down?
It only runs on the page you add it to. The code is about 25 KB compressed, it loads your own blog from your own site, and after the first visit the archive is remembered in the visitor’s browser, so a return visit takes one quick request.
Does it collect any data?
No. There’s no tracking and no outside server. Listening positions and the cached archive stay in each visitor’s own browser.
Can we use our own wording or another language?
Yes. Every label can be changed with a few lines, and you can add other names for the books of the Bible, for example in te reo Māori.
Will it work on Squarespace 7.0?
Yes. I tested it on a live 7.0 church archive with more than 700 sermons and on 7.1 sites, in Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
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