Coming From Nucleus 1? (A Transition Guide For Nucleus Web)
If you’re reading this guide, you’re likely familiar with Nucleus 1 Web - the original product that started it all. While we’ll always have fond memories of it, it’s time to move onto bigger and better things. (And significantly improved features and capabilities!)
While there are a lot of similarities to Nucleus 1 Web, there are also quite a few differences - and a greater spread of options to consider. If you’re thinking about rebuilding your website using Nucleus 2, follow this guide to familiarize yourself with what’s new, what’s similar, and everything in between. Our team is so excited for you to experience the new iteration of Nucleus Web! We can’t wait to see what you create 😊
In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.
A Comparison Between Nucleus 1 & Nucleus 2 Web
Though you might want to dive right into Nucleus 2 and skip all this preamble, we think it’s best to understand the differences (and similarities) between the two platforms to help orient you to the new platform. That way, when you do start building your new website, you’re already familiar with some of the new features and ways to enter and manipulate the data you add to your website.
Below is a list of several items worth noting. So buckle up! Here we go 😎
Autosave
In almost every instance of Nucleus 1, whenever you made any edits to a page, navigation, footer - you name it - you had to manually save those changes. Otherwise, all the work you created would be lost.
Now, in most places, Nucleus 2 Web automatically saves all your work in the background so you don’t have to. (And everyone sighs in resounding unison 😄) And every time you go to exit the page you’re working on, you’ll be asked whether you want to accept those changes (Save & Close), or to Discard Changes and Nucleus will forget everything that was just autosaved.
And in some rare cases with Nucleus 1, when your internet connection would blip and then you went to click the save button, your edits wouldn’t be saved. (We all know how terrible that feeling is 😣) With autosave, you never have to worry about that again.
Now, when our system tries to autosave in the background and can’t connect to the internet, it will give you a warning, and after a few minutes of being ignored, it will lock you from doing any further edits until a connection with the internet is re-established in order to prevent you from losing all your work.
Scheduling Edits On Published Pages
One of the biggest pain points in Nucleus 1 was that you couldn’t schedule changes on a page that was already published. (Sure, you could schedule a new page to publish in the future, but that’s about it.)
Now, you can make any changes - no matter how big or small - to a page that’s currently published and schedule them to go live at a future date and time. This allows you to make planned adjustments to your website without having to wait down to the wire before providing a significant update to a particular page. (Hooray for less stress! 🙌)
Lists
You asked for it, and we heard you! Remember how you could create a page in Nucleus 1 but you could never reorder it? Sure, that’s fine if you only have a few pages. But if you had dozens of pages, that All Pages tab became a nightmare pretty quickly.
Now, Nucleus 2 Web features a sidebar that helps you organize pages exactly how you want.
First, there are automatic lists created to help you keep track of pages that are scheduled to be published, in the works, and ones that have never been published. (Of course, we had to keep the infamous All Pages list 😂) For all three new categories, you’ll see a notification for how many pages currently match those qualifications.
Perhaps even more importantly, you can now create your own custom lists and manually group specific pages together in their own category! You can create unlimited lists, though be careful. You don’t want your lists to get out of control just like All Pages in Nucleus 1 🙈
And even better - you can reorder the pages you add to each list! Just like you could reorder the pages found on your Nucleus 1 homepage, you can drag and drop the pages in the precise order that you want. (And all the admins who love organization said, “Amen!” 🙏)
These lists go beyond just organization though. They can also be pulled into other areas of Nucleus Web as Smart Data. For instance, if you wanted to showcase all of your small groups and you had all your small group pages in a single list, you could then easily populate a section of a general "Small Groups" page with all the pages in that list, displayed in a fashion you're all too familiar with: cards 😎
Privacy Controls
One of the most frequent feature requests from Nucleus 1 was the ability to make individual pages hidden or private. Well, request no more! Nucleus 2 Web now provides you multiple different privacy controls on a per-page basis.
Whenever you create a new page, Nucleus will ask you what level of privacy you want to set that page to. (Don’t worry - you can always adjust these options later on.)
- Public: Any person or robot on the internet can view, save or screenshot all page content. And it’s okay for this page and its content to be indexed and stored by search engines (e.g. Google)
- Hidden: The page’s content can still be seen or shared by anyone with the link. Hidden simply means it is unlisted and search engines will be told not to index the content. If you want your page fully protected, use the “Private” option.
- Private: Requires a Nucleus login to access. This fully protects your page and prevents indexing. Only those connected with your church who sign in and match the allowed types below can view.
Setting a page to private relies on Nucleus Connection Types. Not only does this require someone to login using their personal My Nucleus login credentials, but then their profile must have the corresponding Connection Type associated with it that you’ve set the private page to allow people with that Connection Type to access that page.
Connection Types power privacy controls throughout the entire Nucleus platform, so if you’re new to Nucleus 2, we highly recommend checking out the Understand Nucleus Web Privacy Options guide, along with The People Database & Profile Management guide. Both of these articles will help you understand Connection Types and the Nucleus People database and records/profiles function.
Multiple Admins
When you create a Nucleus 1 account, there is a single, universal login created. This made having several people work and manage your Nucleus 1 account pretty difficult and unsafe. Not only did you have to share the login email and password with multiple people (which you should never have to do), but whoever logged in had access to absolutely everything in your Nucleus 1 account. (If you have trust issues coming off of this way of managing your Nucleus 1 account, we’re truly sorry 😅)
Because Nucleus 2 was built from the ground up on an entirely new platform, we were able to introduce multiple admins with their own unique login credentials. (No more sharing passwords!)
Not only that, but each admin can have their own unique access and permission levels. This lets you limit an admin’s access to only the products they need to access, as well as provide them specific types of access to those products.
Are they a manager and need to create and edit content? Or do they just need to be able to view content? Nucleus 2 lets you grant fine-tuned access and permission levels on an individual basis, so now you can have ease of mind that whoever logins in won’t mess with anything they shouldn’t be. (Tisk, tisk!)
Specifically for Nucleus 2 Web, you can invite admins to access all of Nucleus Web, but with specific levels of access.
But even more granular, you can invite an admin to help manage Nucleus Web on a per-page basis. This means you can grant a volunteer access to help edit a webpage promoting an event that they’re running, without granting them access to edit your entire website.
Whenever you create a new page, you’ll be presented with the option to invite an admin to access that page (as shown above). But you can always manage an admin’s access later on too.
With all sorts of permutations of admin access for Nucleus 2 Web, we hope you’re able to expand who can help manage your website, and take some of the burden off of your shoulders 😌
Click here to learn more about inviting multiple admins to your Nucleus church account.
Sections On Pages
When building a webpage in Nucleus 1, there was a list of content blocks in the left sidebar that you could drag and drop directly onto the page.
While creating a page in this way was super simple, it was also fairly limiting in designing and formatting your page.
Now when creating a webpage in Nucleus 2, instead of adding content blocks to a page, you’ll add sections. There are various types of sections you can add (with more to come down the road).
Note: This is one of the most significant changes to how you’ll build webpages in Nucleus 2. So when building your first few pages, take your time. Explore. Test things out. Try using our page templates to get a good feel for how information and content can be formatted and displayed in sections on a page. We know you’ll get the hang of it in no time 😎
- Information Section: A text and image based section that allows you to present specific content and descriptions. Think of a combination between the Heading, Paragraph, Image, and Button content blocks from Nucleus 1. The Information Section allows you to format and design these types of content in various ways within a specific section on your webpage. (Yes, this even includes displaying content in columns 🥲) This will likely be your most used type of section on your webpages.
- Cards Section: Most similar to the Cards content block in Nucleus 1, this section allows you to create a cards-based section that links out to other areas: another page on your website, a specific Flow or Info Card, or an external URL.
- List Section: While you could technically use an Information Section to display a list using bullet points, the List Section formats information you need to present in a list format in a more elevated manner. You can even store information in an accordion style, which is perfect for using on a Beliefs page, where you can expand/collapse information without having all the content expanded at once, creating an overwhelming experience for the visitor to your site.
- HTML (Embed) Section: Similar to the HTML content block in Nucleus 1, you can use this section to add whatever custom code you want to appear. And yes, you read that right: whatever. No longer relegated to simple HTML or CSS code, you can now embed JavaScript in a specific section on a webpage. (And all the coders rejoiced 🎉)
- Calendar Section: Similar to the Calendar content block in Nucleus 1, this section lets you display information from Google Calendar. But wait! There’s more! Now you can display information from any iCal feed format!
- Leaders & Staff Section: Take advantage of another new feature in Nucleus 2; Smart Data. Here you can add structured records for pastors/elders, deacons, staff, and more. It’s a great way to centralize church-maintained data for each type of leader so you can present your pastors and staff in an organized way and re-use their information in other areas of Nucleus like Web, Sermons, and Posts.
- Sermons Section: Want to add a your most recent Sermon to your homepage? With the Sermon Section you can dynamically link to your SermonHub and showcase your most recent sermon, or other sermons, like a selected list.
With each section, there are text and photo options (much like with the Information Section), so it’s important to understand that you’re not just adding content blocks, but specific Sections with their own capabilities and use cases.
Sections are a great way to help separate information on the same page, especially with the ability to change design elements (like the background color or photo) of each section to make each one distinct.
And if you’re wanting even further customization to how a specific section looks, you can also include CSS code that affects only that particular section, rather than the entire page.
While the content blocks in Nucleus 1 served us well for a time, Sections in Nucleus 2 allows for so many more possibilities of what information you can display - along with how you can display that information - on every page you build for your website. We’re excited for you to see how much more flexibility we’ve introduced with Section editing 🤩
No Photo Cropping
For header images in Nucleus 1, you needed to crop the photos in both landscape and portrait mode depending on whether the image would appear at the top of the webpage or as a card showcased on the homepage or in a Cards content block. (And you had to do this all in the same interface, so it was quite frankly confusing and poor design.)
To keep things simple, you no longer need to crop photos in Nucleus 2 Web. Because anyone can visit your website on any device with all various sizes of screens, the size of the image will also be different. So cropping the image doesn’t make much sense.
Instead, all you need to do is set a focal point. Just like in Nucleus 1, after you upload an image, you’ll be able to edit the image and select a focal point. That way, no matter where the image shows up, that area will be locked in as the central position of the photo.
Simplicity sometimes just makes sense 😌
Elevated Custom Code Injection
One of the bigger pain points of Nucleus 1 was how it rendered and loaded custom code. While Javascript could be added to the global code injection field (which would inject the code into the header of your website), you couldn’t add Javascript to an HTML Code content block on a specific page (nor target a specific page to inject custom script into).
Now with Nucleus 2, you can inject code at the highest and most granular levels of your website. No longer is Javascript relegated to the header of your website. Now you can inject it at the header level, individual page level, and individual Section level.
Not only that, but the way you can organize your custom codes has significantly improved. Instead of having a giant single field where all your code exists (like in Nucleus 1), now you can create various individual snippets of code, name them, and reorder them!
Talk about a significant improvement 🤓
Automatic Installation Of The Launcher
If you’re coming from Nucleus 1 and you haven’t heard about The Launcher, what have you been doing for the past couple of years? 🙈 The Launcher by Nucleus is your church’s central hub of all next steps. At its most basic level, think of it as a Linktree on every page of your website. But The Launcher is so much more than that. It can be used to house every single next step your church offers, accessible no matter where people land on your website.
Previously with Nucleus 1, you had to manually install The Launcher on your website by adding custom code to your global code injection field.
Now, The Launcher comes pre-installed on any Nucleus 2 website, so you don’t need to worry about where to find the code and where to add it to your Nucleus Web. (Not that it would be difficult to find. It’s all housed within the same Dashboard after all 😁)
Just think of it as a little extra gift to you 🎁
Note: Of course, if you really don’t want to use The Launcher, you can always opt out. But if you utilize any other product of Nucleus, it could bring unforeseen consequences, so we highly recommend leaving it live on your website.
Click here to learn more about The Launcher by Nucleus.
Flows Replace Forms
As a platform focusing on next steps, it only made sense for Nucleus to have a way to capture submission data. Nucleus 1 accomplished this through the Form content block. While it was able to serve its purpose in most contexts for churches, it was a fairly basic and somewhat limited form builder.
Now with Nucleus 2, instead of building forms, you can build Flows - the far superior tool to curate questions and collect data for anyone taking next steps at your church 😎
What’s even better is that instead of existing in one specific part of one specific page of your website, all your Flows can exist on every single page, housed directly in The Launcher (which is accessible on every page of your website).
This is why you won’t find a Forms Section when building a webpage. While we hope churches will utilize our own tools, we understand that many churches use other platforms (like Planning Center or CCB) for signups and to capture information. Because of this, we didn’t want to force churches to pay for a powerful product (Flows) they wouldn’t be using. So Flows exists as its own separate paid product apart from Nucleus Web.
Every 30-day trial of Nucleus 2 gives you access to Nucleus Flows for you to try and experience the vastly significant improvement compared to the Nucleus 1 Form content block.
Note: If you are a Charter Partner or hopped on the End-Of-Year sale (from 2022), you already have access to Flows, no trial necessary 😎
Click here to learn more about Nucleus Flows.
Expanded Navigation Menus
In Nucleus 1, there was only one navigation menu to worry about (in your website’s header). While there is nothing technically wrong with just the one navigation bar, if you have a lot of pages on your website, nesting them all within a single navigation bar can become convoluted very quickly.
Now you can choose where your navigation items exist: in the header or footer of your website. You read that right: Nucleus 2 Web allows you to have a footer navigation menu! 🥂
Now you can keep your main navigation items in your header and secondary items in your footer. (Or however you’d like to manage your navigation items - we won’t stop you 😄)
Not only do you have two places to manage your navigation items, but how you link each item to another place on the internet is so much clearer. Easily connect an item to another page on your website; directly to your GivingFlow, PrayerFlow, or custom Flow; an external URL; or even to a direct download of a file and many more options!
Lastly, another requested feature was to be able to access your website’s sitemap. While this option will be turned off by default (because most people don’t need to worry about this part of your website), you can now access and manage your sitemap in your Nucleus Web’s settings.
Tips For Transitioning To Nucleus 2 Web
While you’re more than welcome to rebuild your website however you’d like, we’ve put together an order of operations of sorts to help you along. That, combined with your comparison knowledge (above) of the two platforms, we believe you’ll sail smoothly right into your completed Nucleus 2 website ⛵
1. Review your current Nucleus 1 website.
Of course, you can blindly rebuild your website from scratch without any reference point to your old website. But that’s pretty risky business, as you could easily forget to include important pieces of information that’s on your current site, so we don’t recommend that route 😅
Instead, take stock of all the webpages that you have on your current website. Are they all necessary? Can you do without some of them? Can you consolidate some together? Can certain pages be made using Info Cards? Are there some pages missing that need to be included in your Nucleus 2 website?
Similarly, how is your navigation menu laid out? Is it confusing or too cluttered? Remember, Nucleus 2 offers a Footer Navigation menu, so you can reorganize and simplify your Header Navigation and leave the more granular navigation items to the Footer Navigation.
Speaking of the Footer, what information is currently listed there? Is there any important information that’s missing? Is there too much information right now that should be reduced?
Regarding any forms, make a list of the forms that currently exist on your current website. As alluded to above, you’ll need to remake those forms in Nucleus Flows, which is a separate paid product. Thankfully, you gain full access to Nucleus Flows for 30-days, so you can easily remake those forms in Flows 😎
Click here for our Getting Started guides on how to create your first Flow!
2. Collect your branding assets & images.
Whether from your own digital files or from another creative director at your church, you’ll want to gather all your branding assets, like your church’s logo (dark and light versions), specific branding colors (hex codes are great!), certain fonts, etc.
From there, if you plan on reusing any of the images from your current website (e.g. any staff pictures), you’ll want to make sure you have access to those so you can easily upload them to your Nucleus 2 account when it comes time to create those specific pages.
3. Customize basic design elements of your website
Designing a website is one of the most exciting parts of building a website, so we know you’re likely eager to see all the possible options you can tweak. You can see all the design options here in your Design Panel.
But because you don’t have all of your own content uploaded or pages created on your site yet , it’ll be difficult to know exactly how the design options you select will actually translate on the front end of your website.
To help start you off, we’ve given you a demo homepage. That way, you can see basic design elements as you change them, using the Preview URL option in your Dashboard. This will open a new tab and take you directly to your homepage.
But before you spend hours and hours adjusting every minute detail possible, we recommend just focusing on the following for now:
Upload your logos here. (You’ll want to click the Turn On/Off Content button.)
Add in your church’s branding colors here. (If you don’t have a brand guide or it doesn’t specify specific colors, just select a default color palette for now.)
Select your fonts per your church’s brand guide here. (If you don’t have a brand guide or it doesn’t specify specific fonts, just select a font pack for now.)
While there are many other design options available to play around with, above are the most important ones for now. We’ll return to tweaking all design options below.
4. Rebuild your website in Nucleus 2 one page at a time.
While it can feel overwhelming creating a new website from scratch, if you focus on one page at a time, you’ll rebuild your entire website in a jiffy!
To help with this, we recommend starting off with using our page templates. Just like with Nucleus 1, each template will have pre-written copy and a unique set of sections already added to give you a launching point that you can edit and rework with your own content.
Speaking of content, we recommend focusing on your content first before worrying about the design of your website. As much as it will be tempting to play around with all the color, text, and other design options, you won’t be able to see what those design options affect until you have something created in the first place. So begin with adding all your text, photos, and hyperlinks. Then go back to the Design Panel.
This also means that when you preview your pages, while the colors and fonts may not be quite to your taste just yet, it’s good to focus on the actual layout of the content, as this can all be adjusted directly in that page’s settings, not in the Design Panel.
Note: Throughout the building experience, your Nucleus 2 website lives on a Nucleus subdomain - just like it did in Nucleus 1. The final step will be to connect your custom domain with your Nucleus 2 website. But anytime you preview your pages, you’ll be directed to your unique subdomain.
5. Collect any outstanding assets & images.
While creating pages, you might realize you need new or updated pictures. If you notice any particular images you don’t have, make a list as you’re creating your pages so you can keep track of where the missing images should go - and so you can send a single list of needed images to whomever is responsible for taking photos at your church instead of several one-off requests.
6. Create your navigation menu(s).
Once you have all your pages (and hopefully Flows!) created, begin creating your navigation menu(s). As mentioned above, you now have the opportunity to share the items in your Header Navigation with your Footer Navigation.
Because the Footer Navigation now exists, we recommend taking this opportunity to declutter your Header Navigation and only include the most important items there. All secondary items can instead exist in your Footer Navigation. This just helps to display a cleaner, less overwhelming main navigation menu for visitors to your website.
7. Refine the look of your website.
After all that is done, return to the Design Panel. Now that you have all of your content added, and your pages and navigation menu(s) created, when you preview your website, you can now see all the various design elements and what they affect on the front end of your website.
Go ahead and revisit the colors and fonts selected previously to fine-tune those options. But don’t miss out on the other options you haven’t touched yet! You can make design edits to the rest of your Header, Footer, Buttons, and even Animations! All of this is found in your Design Panel here.
As you edit the colors, fonts, buttons, and animations, make sure to preview your edits on the go. It would be quite unfortunate to make a ton of edits, and then preview your changes, only to find out those creative adjustments you made were certainly on the creative side (if you catch our drift 😆)
8. Double check the elements of The Launcher.
By default, The Launcher will already be installed on your website. (You’re welcome 😉) But that doesn’t mean we’ve designed it or added any actions to your Launcher. For that, you’ll need to make sure all your actions linking to Info Cards, Flows, the Prayer Hub, other pages on your website, external links, etc. are all added correctly to ensure the best unveiling experience to your church!
We have an entire section in our Help Center on how to set up The Launcher and to make use of Banners and Info Cards. Click here to read those details.
9. Hook up your custom domain.
Lastly, once your entire website is all set up to go, it’s time to point your domain to your new Nucleus 2 website.
If you recall from setting up your Nucleus 1 website, you needed access to your domain registrar (who you purchased your domain from) in order to point your domain to a specific IP address. The same principle applies in Nucleus 2.
We actually have an entire guide on pointing your domain to your Nucleus 2 website here. But the gist is two-fold:
- Add your domain here in your Nucleus Dashboard.
- Change the IP address of your domain’s A Record to 52.223.25.144
But before you do this, be sure that you’re ready to unveil your new website to your church (and to the rest of the world!). Make sure you’re in communication with the rest of your church staff so you’re not accidentally jumping the gun.
In fact, we have an entire Nucleus Rollout Guide that we recommend checking out before making anything live. This will hopefully help ensure you haven’t missed anything super glaring before launching your new website and introducing The Launcher to your church.
What Next?
Phew! That was a lot. But hopefully you found this guide helpful. We certainly don’t want you to feel overwhelmed while creating your new website. While there were a lot of details above, we have an entire Getting Started section in our Help Center with even more details on getting your Nucleus 2 website up and running. Click any of the guides below to get started.