Embed or Link Your Church Center Pages

Planning Center uses Church Center to host groups, events, and donation forms. When signing up for People, Groups, Registrations, or Giving, your church will be asked to create a unique churchcenter.com URL to host your own groups, events, and donation forms.

You also have the option to use Publishing to set up Church Center web and app. With Publishing, you have the option to add additional custom pages, host live sermon streams, and create a library of videos from previous services.

For now, there are no theming controls for Church Center. We've intentionally kept the design of Church Center as neutral as possible (black text on a white page with blue links). 

Which pages should I link to?

You can link to Church Center pages from your own church website or embed them, depending on the type of page.

• For Giving donation pages and People forms , you can either embed the pages into your website or link to them.
• Registrations and Groups will not work correctly if you embed them, so we recommend linking to them.

Linking examples

Here are a few examples of ways that you can link to the unique Church Center sites for your church:

• On your church website, the Donate Now button can link to: https://yoursubdomain.churchcenter.com/giving
• In your church calendar, you can link the Winter Camp event to: https://yoursubdomain.churchcenter.com/registrations/events/1345
• On your page about small groups, you can link your Find a Group button to https://yoursubdomain.churchcenter.com/groups/small-groups/

Here are some examples of how those pages look on Church Center:

• Public Groups List
• Individual Group Pages
• Event Listings
• Event Pages
• Donation Pages
• Forms

Instead of linking straight to https://yoursubdomain.churchcenter.com from your church website, link to a certain group, event, or fund, which is easier for people to find specific information.

Why shouldn't I embed events or groups?

If you embed events or groups into your webpages, you might run into the issues shown in the sections below:

Potential Security Warnings

Church Center uses an encrypted TLS connection which may differ from your church's website. On event registrations that require payment, Church Center asks for credit card numbers and bank account information. 

When these forms are framed by another website, some browsers raise security alerts to visitors, even if your church website is also SSL encrypted. It's not an impossible technical hurdle, but it means that this setup is more volatile as web browsers become increasingly proactive about protecting their users. 

Bad User Experience

On mobile devices, where screen space is already limited, trying to cram the whole Groups or Registrations system into a smaller box with a fixed height makes it nearly unusable. As it's designed, Church Center is meant to work well on small-screen devices like phones and tablets.

To make matters worse, when operating in an iframe, the web browser's forward and back buttons usually don't work correctly. The "parent" website essentially hijacks the back button which can be maddening if you're two steps into your event registration process. 

Selectable, Shareable, Bookmarkable URLs

When a website is boxed in by an iframe, the URL (link) to that page isn't accessible to the visitor – only the parent page's URL is visible. This isn't a problem for simpler "widget" type things, like a Pinterest pin, or even a Facebook page comment. These elements exist as properties of that page, and visitors don't need or care about the URL of those small bits of functionality. 

This isn't the case with, for example, a small group's group page or an event's registration page. People need those URLs to be able to share them, save them, or copy-and-paste them.