Seedcast Bulletin Library

Description

Seedcast explains Sunday.

Every week your church gathers and something happens that is worth keeping. Seedcast Bulletin Library turns that gathering into a page: the date, the message, the programs that met, the announcements that mattered that week, and the handouts people took home. Publish it once and it stays put. The week you are living now quietly becomes the archive a visitor reads next year.

It answers the question every visitor is already asking before they ever walk through your doors: what is it actually like to be part of this church?

Built for whoever runs the bulletin

Everything happens in the WordPress admin, in plain language. Create a service, choose the date, and the plugin offers you the programs and announcements that belong to that week. Click Add and they attach. There is no page builder to learn, no template to edit and no code to write, and the Services list tells you at a glance which Sundays are still missing something.

What lives on a service page

• A dated heading, so every Sunday has its own permanent URL and its own place in the archive.
• A featured image or video. Drop in a YouTube, Vimeo or direct MP4 URL and the video plays in place of the image. You choose whether the image sits above the overview, below it, or stays hidden.
• A service overview written in the normal WordPress editor. Prefer blocks? Turn the block editor on for services with one checkbox.
• Today’s Programs, each with its time, description, image and optional link.
• This Week’s Announcements, laid out as cards with time, location, contact details and an event link.
• Today’s Handouts, printable materials that render as download buttons beside the program they belong to.
• A sermon, when Sermon Library is installed, and any other section a companion Seedcast plugin contributes.
• Share buttons for Facebook, X, LinkedIn, email and copy link.

Programs

Programs are the parallel experiences happening at your gathering: Sunday School, Youth Program, Main Service, Kids Church. Write each one once, with a title, time, description, image and an optional link to the ministry page on your site. From then on it is offered to you every week, ready to attach with a single click.

Announcements that know which Sunday they belong to

An announcement carries a display period: a start date and either an end date or “ongoing”. Any Sunday whose week overlaps that range is offered the announcement automatically, so a notice that runs for six weeks appears on six service pages without anyone remembering to add it. Each announcement can carry a time, a location, contact name, email and phone, an event link and its own image, and empty fields simply disappear from the card.

Contact names autocomplete from a shared contacts list, so the same ministry leader is spelled and reached the same way everywhere.

History that stays true

When you save a service, its announcements, programs and handouts are copied and frozen into that page. Change a program’s description next spring and last autumn’s services keep the wording that was actually true that day. When a source has moved on from a saved copy, the editor shows an “Update” prompt on the affected item so you can pull the current fields in deliberately, with one click, on the services where it matters.

Structured data for search engines and AI assistants

Every service page emits full JSON-LD: an Event with startDate, datePublished, dateModified, location and organizer, a nested VideoObject when a service video is set, a subEvent list built from that day’s Programs, and BreadcrumbList markup. Search engines can index each Sunday as a distinct event, and AI assistants can answer “what is happening at this church on Sunday?” from structured, first-party data on your own domain instead of guessing from a PDF.

Settings that keep it yours

• Rename “Service” to Gathering, Meeting or whatever your church actually calls it, singular and plural.
• Set the archive heading, the intro paragraph and how many services show before paginating.
• Choose the URL slug before you publish.
• Set a fallback image for services without one of their own.
• Switch off the plugin’s front-end CSS entirely if you would rather style everything in your theme. The markup and class names stay exactly the same.
• Show or hide the Visitor Card sidebar on service pages.

Shortcodes

• [scbl_services limit="6" columns="3" start_date="2026-01-01"] a grid of service cards. Attributes: limit (default 10), columns (1 to 4, default 3), start_date (YYYY-MM-DD, hides services before that date).
• [scbl_next_service] a featured card for the next upcoming service.
• [scbl_announcements] currently active announcements as a grid.
• [seedcast_church_details] your church name, address, service times, phone, email and a directions link, all read from one place so a move or a time change is a single edit.

Part of the Seedcast suite

Bulletin Library carries the shared foundation the rest of the Seedcast plugins build on: one set of church details, one theme token system so everything matches, a submission engine with spam protection, and a sections filter that lets any Seedcast plugin add its own content to a service page.

Sermon Library adds sermons that appear on the matching service automatically. Praise Report, Sing, Help, Hospitality and Visitor Card each contribute their own section. Install one or install them all: Bulletin Library works on its own, and the service page grows as you add companions.

Privacy

The plugin sends nothing to any external service. Your services, programs, announcements, handouts and contacts stay in your own WordPress database.