After some short delays and a few extra days of testing, WPtouch 1.8 is now available as an update through the WordPress administration panel, or as a download here on the website.

There’s been a considerable number of changes that are detailed in the readme.txt file, but we’re including most of them here with some extra notes.

Under The Hood The Engine Got A Scrub Down

Duane spent considerable time re-writing the core admin code, optimizing and restructuring the way WPtouch works its magic. Over and above the obvious reasons for doing this, we’re preparing for full tilt-a-whirl action with the release of WPtouch 2.0, a significant upgrade which will deliver the long-awaited internationalization and theme features.

As with any major change, we’ve done the best we could to test under a variety of conditions, but hope that feedback from you, our user, will help us weed out any additional hiccups as a result.

Manual Icons Are Bygone

Finally we’ve delivered a proper mechanism for the management of your custom icons through WPtouch. The upgrade to WPtouch is the last time you’ll have to say good bye to your custom icons with an upgrade, and have to manually replace them. With WPtouch 1.8 you can upload and delete your custom icons from the WPtouch admin panel, and future upgrades to both WPtouch and WordPress won’t affect your custom selections.

You’ve Got Style! More Options, Background Choices

We’ve has several requests to open up our rigid ways and allow for more customization of style options. While we do see the merit in this, part of our rigidity has to do with plans to allow for custom themes with WPtouch 2.0, thereby creating the ability for everyone to create tweaked versions of WPtouch or really unique, totally customized themes.

But WPtouch 2.0 is stilla few months away, so in the mean time we’ve added a few more style options.

So, added in this update is:

• The abilty to decide if paragraphs should be full width (default) or left-aligned
• The ability to choose between three different scales of font sizes
  (Regular, Medium & Large)
• The ability to choose between 3 different pinstripe background images
  (Classic, Horizontal, Diagonal)

Finding The Path To Home: Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed a number of path issues with WPtouch 1.8. As WPtouch is a complex plugin with features and functions that far surpass the average plugin its more difficult than it seems to bring all these great and advanced features to all kinds of WordPress users, hosting WordPress in unique ways. So we do our best with each successive update to make sure WPtouch looks in all the right places to find the things it needs to know about your WordPress install to work for you.

You Say Login, I Say Logout

There have been a few bugs related to login/out features working on some versions of WordPress, and we think we’ve solved them all. If you’ve had an issue related to this, please update and check to see if we’ve resolved it and report back.

We’ve also fixed a number of other minor issues, all of which are listed in the readme.txt file that accompanies the plugin .zip file.

Salam! Kaixo! Hej! Aloha! Salut! Hello!

WPtouch 1.8 has been prepared for internationalization. Over the coming weeks we’ll be working with some great volunteers to deliver WPtouch 1.9 in at least 5 languages, and we’ll work to try and at least double that for WPtouch 2.0. If you think you can help us accomplish this, please drop an e-mail to wptouch@bravenewcode.com and let us know what lingo you’re fluent in. If it’s a language not yet added, we’ll send the project details for you to help us out on Launchpad.

Coming Soon… And Then There Were Themes

With WPtouch 2.0, you’ll be able to do the same with themes. Custom style sheets, and even entire themes built off of the new core theme capabilities will bring the same great theming possibilities of WordPress itself to WPtouch. Stay tuned for information on our theme contest.

There’s a batch more things in this update, if you’re interested checkout the full list of changes here.