Beta Busting

To say that things have changed from Beta 1 through 7 would be an understatement! Thanks to great help in the support forums from those of you who’ve been actively testing the betas we’re approaching Beta 8, a release that will see the addition of skins, a series of mods to the default appearance of WPtouch (the above image shows ‘Lavender’ and ‘Frog’). Skins can be easily selected in the admin, and will add more colorful branding to WPtouch. Skins will be great for those that like the default theme’s layout but are looking for a stronger color branding that resembles their site’s theme. We’ll add other skins too.

Bug Squish

We’ve killed several bugs over the beta releases, and added a slew of features both visible and under the hood. We hope that with each successive release there are fewer issues as a whole, and the beta program will help immensely with that.

WordPress Version Support

Due to father time, we’ll be dropping support for WordPress 2.3, 2.5 and 2.6.1 – 2.6.4. We’d prefer to stick with support for secure versions of WordPress, and given that as of WordPress 2.7 you can stay up to date with the latest WordPress version simply by clicking a button- there’s no excuse not to stay current. We’ll be incorporating all the latest and greatest features, and won’t be held back from including things like nested & paginated comments, features which are harder to implement when you’re supporting versions of WordPress over 18 months old.

What’s Been Done

Here’s a rough list of what’s been accomplished so far:

• Changed default theme styles for images (now load as background images)
• Made sprites for small theme images to load quicker
• Added all-new variations on the default theme as style selections (Frog, Sea, Lavender, Sunkissed)
• Added jQuery color picker in the admin hex areas for easier style selections
• Fix for Categories, Tags & Login links not working in some mobile browsers (Android, etc)
• Combined CSS files and minified javascript files
• Updated Ajax Upload script to 3.2
• Moved adsense.php to include folder
• Updated screenshots for new designs
• Fixed an issue where excerpts could contain too much spacing
• New admin styling, plugin support for WordPress 2.6.5 sites
• Revised header area styling
• Search now floats overtop the headerbar
• Refined drop down button
• Footer switch link now a part of Core
• No longer using the_content_rss() for excerpts, created a custom function which handles it nicely
• Home link in menu drop down now respects the logo/bookmark icon choice
• Fixed the way javascript is called for a elements, should work better in other mobile browsers
• Moved several images into the core images folder, building more dependency on CoreTheme
• Fix for custom page icons not showing up on pages
• Added link to online icon generator in admin
• Fixed device-width mobileSafari bug
• Added style declaration for images in comments
• More theme changes/enhancements, particularly in the header, footer
• Added ‘My Account’ button in the sub-header for logged in users replacing ‘Logout’
• Fixed issue where chosen pages and icons did not appear in the drop down
• Removed 404 image with English text in it, replaced it with localized 404 text
• Updated fancybox to compressed v1.2.1
• Fixed a few areas that had text not yet localized, improperly coded
• Removed depreciated or unused functions from previous releases
• Removed ability to disable jQuery; WPtouch Exclusive mode should fix JS issues
• Added native select for Tags
• Updated compatibility code (Various WordPress install scenarios) ~ thanks to Will Norris for the suggestions
• Modified AJAX calls
• Made it so administration CSS/JS only loads on WPtouch page
• Fixed a variety of scenarios where paths to files and images were broken
• Updated social bookmarking icons
• More preparation for WPtouch 1.9 and 5 languages
• Preparation for WPtouch 2.0 and themes support (based on CoreTheme)
• Fixed switch link issue where regular theme switch link was broken
• Major re-writes of theme files, css for simplicity, CoreTheme
• Updates to default theme style

What’s To Come

We’ve still got a couple more skins to do, and then the plugin will be shipped off for localization. We’re looking into a couple methods for easy localization, so stay tuned if you offered to help and we’ll soon deliver to you the information on how to get started- we want to make sure the English text is settled so that it doesn’t have to be changed often and require revision from translators.

Beta 8 should be available this week, and will include the new skins for testing.