SermonIndex

SermonIndex.net has been preserving the preaching of God's Word since 2002. This plugin brings that archive onto your own site: nearly 40,000 audio sermons from more than 1,500 preachers, free, with nothing to sign up for. You choose what you take. A whole preacher, a handful of sermons, or your own curated corner of the archive — the messages your church would actually put in someone's hands. Real pages, not embeds. Each preacher gets a page on your site, with their portrait and biography filled in for you and a space at the top for your own words. Every sermon plays on that page — title, description, scripture and topic tags, a player and a download button that live here rather than somewhere else. Your speaker pages are yours. The introduction you write, the sermons you pick and the order you put them in are your work, and the plugin treats them that way. You edit all of it on a screen built for it, inside the SermonIndex panel — not in the post editor, which has no way of knowing that the preacher's name and biography belong to the archive rather than to you. And the Bible. Download any of more than a thousand complete translations to your own site and read them here, with no call to anyone else's server once they have arrived. Sermon pages credit the archive. Each one carries a canonical link back to SermonIndex, so search engines attribute the sermon text where it belongs while you keep the player, the download and the visitor. Nobody competes with anybody. Keep your own copy. You can download the audio to your own site instead of streaming it. It is the recommended setting: your sermons then keep playing whatever happens to anyone else's server, and one more copy of the archive exists in the world. Check your hosting plan first — a prolific preacher can run to several gigabytes. What this plugin sends Nothing about your visitors is sent to SermonIndex by this plugin. But please read the next section: in the default streaming mode your visitors' browsers fetch audio directly from a third-party host, and that is a connection this plugin cannot make anonymous. Saving the audio to your own site removes it. Fetching a sermon adds via=wp to the request, which says a WordPress site asked and identifies nobody. Two optional settings, both off unless you switch them on, and nothing stops working if you leave them off:

• Include this site's address — adds your site's host to requests to the archive, so SermonIndex can see how far it has spread.
• Publish a list of what this site holds — creates a public page at /wp-json/sermonindex/v1/manifest giving your site's address, which preachers you have added and how many sermons each has. SermonIndex reads it to see that the archive is being preserved. Anyone who knows the address can read it too.

0.8.1

• Housekeeping for the plugin directory review: the admin menu icon's styles now go through wp_add_inline_style() instead of being printed into the page head, every REST route states its permission check on its own line, and the two links to SermonIndex's copying permissions and privacy policy now point at the pages that exist.

0.8.0

• A verse for every day of the year, read from whichever Bible translation you have downloaded — so it appears in your language, not ours.
• Choose one sermon to feature large on the sermons page, with a few more drawn at random beneath it.
• Preachers now come first on the sermons page: twenty faces, then a link to a full A–Z list of everyone on your site.
• One look across the sermons page, the preacher pages and the Bible: the same warm background, the same width, the same light and dark switch.
• The preacher masthead is now light, matching the rest of the site instead of a dark panel of its own.
• Fixed: the Bible page loaded with no styling and a light/dark button that did nothing — neither file was ever being loaded on it.
• Fixed: your theme's own page title appeared above ours, so the sermons page said "Sermons" twice and a preacher page opened with a stray byline.
• The running time has moved out of the corner of each card and next to the player, where it belongs.
• Fixed: the SermonIndex screen opened with "That speaker is not on this site" over it every time, until you clicked a tab.
• Fixed: the light/dark button showed both icons at once.
• Fixed: your theme's "Written by … in" line survived on preacher pages. The words around the author's name are ordinary paragraphs in the theme's template, so the whole row is now removed before the page is sent rather than hidden afterwards.
• These pages now run edge to edge, with the bands of white above and below them closed up.
• The Bible screen lists English translations first, in two columns, with the search reserved for the other thousand — and it no longer asks the archive again on every keystroke.
• Larger type in the Bible reader's dropdowns.
• The Bible has its own entry in the WordPress menu.
• Fixed: opening the add-a-preacher panel greyed out the whole screen behind it. The panel was sharing a rule meant for the screen and painting an opaque background across the viewport.
• Sorting a preacher's sermons A–Z is now a setting rather than a renumbering, so sermons imported later slot into place by themselves.
• Fixed: two languages whose codes begin "en" — Apali and Enga — were listed among the English Bibles.
• Fixed: a band of white survived down both sides of every page on themes that nest the content in several padded wrappers.
• A proper progress panel while work runs: which stage is going, what finished last and how long ago, and a details log. A long audio download no longer looks stalled between files.
• Downloads now come from archive.org where the player still uses the CDN — the same file, but the bulk bytes cost the archive nothing.
• Fixed: some preachers were given a YouTube video frame as their portrait instead of the archive's photograph.
• The headline figures count the audio this plugin can actually give you, rather than the whole archive including video.
• A pulpit beside Preachers in the WordPress menu, and a book beside The Bible.
• When work finishes the panel says "Done" and stays until you dismiss it, instead of disappearing.
• Fixed: the progress bar could pass 100% — it read 133% after four files — when the cached sermon count and the saved-file count disagreed. They now check each other and repair the stale one.
• Fixed: the site's address was included in requests to the archive even with that setting switched off.
• Fixed: a fatal error on PHP 7.4 when working out a sermon page's canonical link.
• Fixed: opening a preacher could show the thumbnail of one of their sermons as their portrait.
• The two optional settings now arrive switched off rather than ticked.
• Every external service the plugin uses is now listed in the readme, with what reaches it and when.
• Deleting the plugin now clears its settings and caches. Your sermons, pages and saved audio are left alone.
• The "Sermons from SermonIndex.net" credit line can now be switched off in Settings. The canonical link on each sermon stays — see below.

About the credit line and the canonical link They are two different things, and only one of them is optional. The credit line at the foot of these pages is yours to keep or remove, in Settings → SermonIndex. The canonical link on each sermon is not a setting. It tells search engines that the transcript and description were written at SermonIndex. That is not only for the archive's sake: publishing thousands of pages of someone else's text as though it were your own is how a small site gets buried. The link keeps your site a contributor to the archive rather than a competitor with it — and you keep the player, the download and the visitor.

• Click any verse in the Bible reader to copy it, reference and all.
• Chapter links now name where they go — "Genesis 2", not "Next" — and sit on the side they point to.
• A way back to your sermons page from every preacher.
• Your theme's byline, post navigation and "More posts" no longer appear on these pages.

0.7.0

• A screen of your own for every speaker page, replacing the WordPress post editor. What belongs to the archive — the name, the biography, the sermon titles — is shown as text; what your church decides is a control.
• Show or hide individual sermons, and put them in the order you want them.
• Change a preacher's portrait for one of your own, and put the archive's back whenever you like.
• Start keeping the audio on this site after the fact, with the size on the button, instead of having to remove the preacher and add them again.
• The sermons page can now be written and arranged from the SermonIndex screen: your own heading and opening words, how many sermons to feature, how to order the preachers, and whether to show the Bible.
• More than a thousand Bible translations can be downloaded to your site and read here.

0.6.0

• A sermon player of our own — one consistent control in every browser, with a speed button and one sermon playing at a time.
• Speaker pages are wider, with soft edges and a masthead carrying the portrait, biography and figures.
• Fixed: themes were blowing the portrait up to full width above the page.
• Remove a preacher, with everything that came with them — sermons, portrait and any saved audio.
• "On this site" now shows how many sermons are saved, how much disk they use, and how much room is left.

0.5.0

• Fixed: only a handful of preachers got a portrait or a biography. The paged endpoint carries neither, so every preacher with more than 50 sermons arrived blank.
• A Sermons page is created on activation — a few sermons to listen to straight away, every preacher as a card, and the Bible.
• Speaker pages now fill the width with a warm background, and each sermon carries the preacher's portrait beside its title.
• A light and dark switch on every page, following your system until you choose.
• The add panel no longer opens over an empty stretch of screen.

0.4.0

• One page per preacher. Every sermon now plays on the speaker's own page — title, description, scripture and topic tags, player and download — instead of getting a thin page of its own.
• The speaker page has been redesigned: portrait, your own words first, the archive's biography clearly second.
• Sermon titles and descriptions can no longer be edited, and a preacher's name is kept in step with the archive.
• A checkbox to hide the archive's biography and show only your own.
• A progress bar while importing, with a clear warning not to close the page, and a confirmation if you try to navigate away mid-download.
• The panel no longer greys out the whole screen behind it.

0.3.2

• Fixed: imports never started on sites where WordPress's own scheduler cannot reach itself — the screen now moves the queue along while you watch it.
• Fixed: "Keep a copy on this site" was recorded and then ignored; it now actually downloads once the import finishes.
• Fixed: the welcome dialog rendered transparent.
• An import that fails repeatedly now says so instead of showing progress for ever.

0.3.1

• Fixed: most preachers could not be opened at all. The archive only publishes paged files for speakers with more than 50 sermons, and the plugin asked every speaker for page 1 — a 404 for 1,400 of the 1,582 who have audio.
• Fixed: the add panel rendered transparent, with the grid showing through it.
• Fixed: two identical SermonIndex entries in the admin menu.
• Fixed: the panel disagreed with the card about how many sermons a preacher had.
• A long import no longer looks stuck when most of a preacher's sermons are text rather than audio.
• A welcome screen explaining how this works, and asking once about the two optional settings.

0.3.0

• A new SermonIndex screen: browse preachers as cards with their portraits, featured first, search and an A–Z.
• Choosing a preacher now asks how many sermons and whether to keep a copy in one panel, with the size shown on the choice.
• Speakers and sermons can only come from the archive — no more empty pages created by hand.
• The credit line on sermon pages is no longer optional.
• Browse the Bible's thousand-plus translations (adding them arrives next).

0.2.0

• Sermon lists are paged fifty at a time, with a "Show more" link that works without JavaScript so search engines reach every sermon.
• Choose "Add first 50" instead of a whole speaker when you only want a shelf.
• Keep a copy of the audio on your own site, with the size shown before anything downloads.
• Optional manifest at /wp-json/sermonindex/v1/manifest describing what this site holds.

0.1.0

• First release: speaker and sermon pages, background importing, portraits into the media library, the canonical rule, and the audio player.