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State of the Code, 08/2011: The Future of WPtouch
Aug 26 2011 • Written By Dale Mugford • 37 Comments

“What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.”
~ RAY EAMES

It’s almost September, and here at BraveNewCode the fall is always a productive time. Last year we were hard at work in the fall delivering the 2.1 update for WPtouch Pro which brought child themes, iPad support, and a slew of new capabilities. We were also busy launching Piggy, our mobile web-app for WordPress e-Commerce sales stats, and also began work on WordTwit Pro, the premium version of our popular WordPress to Twitter publishing tool.

Today

We’ve been humbled by the success of WPtouch and WPtouch Pro. To date, WPtouch (+ Pro) runs on over 25 million WordPress websites worldwide, encompassing both self-hosted WordPress.org websites and WordPress.com hosted websites. The simple, elegant and easy-to-use nature of our plugins coupled with our attention to detail and customer care have made us the #1 choice for mobile presentation of a WordPress website, and for this we have to thank our users and customers.

WPtouch (free version)

The free version of WPtouch is regularly maintained, and in recent updates we’ve added some small features, expanded 3rd party plugin support and increased security. We’ll continue to do so going forward, and at some point in the not too distant future we’ll hand-down some of the Pro features to WPtouch.

WPtouch Pro 2.x

There are a few milestones we’d like to reach with the 2.x series of WPtouch Pro. Specifically, more performance and speed improvements both to its themes and the admin panel. Improvements and enhancements in media handling to make it easier to publish audio, video and photos with WPtouch Pro are also planned for the 2.x release series. Improvements and enhancements on iPad are also coming alongside the release of Apple’s iOS 5 software update, due this fall.

The Marketplace

Inevitably, more competitors are entering the mobile market with WordPress and trying to cash in on our success and the popularity that mobile + tablet devices are enjoying worldwide. There’s certainly room for competition and we’re inspired by the WordPress development communities’ creativity.

It seems that WPtouch Pro is the gold standard in mobile plugins; competing products are only now adding some comparable features that WPtouch Pro users have enjoyed for over a year now. It’s exciting to see that our innovations have made an impression, and mobile plugins are expected to offer a baseline of features that we pioneered with WPtouch.

Even Further

We’d like to revolutionize the way mobile themes are made once again. We’ve examined usage and feedback we’ve received and are inventing new ways to approach mobile theme creation and curation. We’re also looking at improving theming options and the extensibility of WPtouch Pro.

We hope customers are going to love what we’ll be delivering with WPtouch Pro down the road.

~The BraveNewCode Team

37 Comments

  1. Thanks as always for all of your hard work. Installed WordTwit Pro and WPtouch Pro on a second website only yesterday.

    The sleek design, speed and efficiency not to mention fantastic support has earned my loyalty and indeed admiration.

    All the best

    James

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      August 27th, 2011

      Thanks James- much appreciated.

  2. Looking forward to seeing what comes next!

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      August 31st, 2011

      Thanks Scott! We look forward to hearing your feedback as always.

  3. brendanross

    September 8th, 2011

    I love WP Touch, but one thing is killing me. This may not be the most appropriate place to post this, but I still think the MOST OBVIOUS improvement would be to include an option for the desktop/mobile toggle to appear at the top of the site when viewed on a mobile device, and not the bottom.

    If the device is an ipad, then what good is it to announce to visitor at the bottom of the page that they have a choice on whether to read the regular or mobile version.

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      September 12th, 2011

      We’re looking to add that option to WPtouch Pro soon. Thanks for the feedback!

    • billyg

      http://www.honuweb.com

      November 5th, 2011

      easy fix… create a new page called “Mobile Theme” iand point to it. It will only show in the mobile view. Which means the mobile devices only will see it… WPtouch ha the option to point to a special page at the top…. use you phone and go to http://www.honuweb.com. and you’ll see. Also ont bottom of option page unchec the page mobile them and it won’t appear on the mobile drop down list. Hope this helps…. aloha

  4. stevecoates

    September 12th, 2011

    Working with WP Touch Pro and would like to say this is a fantastic plugin – well written, attention to detail and a pleasure to work with.

    From developing our first site there are a few things I’d like to ask:

    1. Will ads be supported in iPad soon, at least the custom option? I’ve just hardcoded banner ad into child theme header for now

    2. Search only searching posts makes it pretty useless in our case – is it likely to be extended to pages?

    Cheers

  5. Duane Storey

    BNC Development Guru

    September 14th, 2011

    Hi Steve,

    We’ll take a look at the iPad state of advertising again soon. When we launched there wasn’t really any options to include at the time, other than Google ads. But perhaps things have changed now.

    I believe search uses the WordPress default search, which should return pages as well. We’ll look into it a bit further and possibly add an option here.

    Thanks for your feedback, and we’re glad you like the product!

    • I agree, I think that the advertising has a lot of potential; Especially considering that the iPad is now becoming people’s default way to consume content.

  6. danieledalcin

    September 20th, 2011

    These are my most well spent money on the web !!!!!!
    Fantastic plugin, well done also the control panel …..

  7. matador`

    http://YourWebsiteURL

    September 21st, 2011

    thanks for WPtouch….it’s really cool.
    btw, may i ask a question…
    do you plan in near future to support custom post type on WPtouch free or WPtouch Pro?
    Or you have done it just i don’t noticed about that feature?

    i googled for this concern for a while, and found a poast and reply said “is working on WPtouch support for custom post type” , which will release at some time point…..that’s a post of 2010…..i can’t find later information about it and not sure about the status of this issue….so i comes here to ask directly,i hope you don’t mind.

    any way…..great work…hope you going higher:)

    • Duane Storey

      BNC Development Guru

      September 21st, 2011

      Glad you like WPtouch! This will be enabled in WPtouch Pro shortly, and then probably in WPtouch not long after. I’m not entirely sure on the timeline, but I would guess sometime in the next four weeks you’ll see a WPtouch Pro release that has custom post types enabled.

      • matador`

        http://YourWebsiteURL

        September 21st, 2011

        cool,that’s really good news!thanks for you instant response:)

      • Any word on when Custom Post Type support will be available? One of our clients could definitely use this feature, waiting to buy.

        • Duane Storey

          BNC Development Guru

          November 1st, 2011

          It should be no later than the end of this month.

          • justinruckman

            November 1st, 2011

            Awesome, thanks.

          • Dick Jense

            http://YourWebsiteURL

            December 10th, 2011

            So, how are you guys doing on the custom post types? It’s been deafening quiet, or have I missed something?

            • Duane Storey

              BNC Development Guru

              December 10th, 2011

              Should have something out early next week. It would have been this week, but we had some recent issues with Twitter we had to deal with. But the code is mostly done, we’re just doing some testing right now.

              • Dick Jense

                http://YourWebsiteURL

                December 19th, 2011

                Finished biting my nails, starting on the tops of my fingers now… ;-) How are you guys doing, Duane?

                • Dale Mugford

                  BNC Design Guru

                  December 19th, 2011

                  2.5 release is imminent. We got held up because of the WordPress 3.3 release, which meant more testing and fixing a fee bugs.

  8. Arash

    September 21st, 2011

    Worldwide Android has passed iOS and now has a bigger market share. Android, unlike Apple does allow WebView, so that an app can be created.

    With so much more competition on mobile plugins and themes, wouldn’t a possible next step be to allow paid users to create an Android app, based on WPtouch?

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      September 23rd, 2011

      That’s true of handsets, but not of browser market share. Android users don’t surf the web as much or as often, according to the statistics.

      And it’s not that it can’t be done- you can wrap WPtouch sites for Android or iPhone, there are many cases where it’s been done already.

      We just don’t offer that as a service ourselves.

  9. Hi,

    Just installed the free version on my new short story website. Will upgrade to pro if people begin using it (am tracking with a dedicated Google Analytics account for just the mobile version)!

    Really simple to use, I like your plugin a lot.

    Joseph Elliot

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      September 23rd, 2011

      Awesome, much appreciated Joseph.

  10. shahramkhorsand

    October 5th, 2011

    God morning all!
    I am a two day old WPtouch user and i am loving it!
    Well done and well designed product.
    Also, the support rocks!
    Cheers,
    Shahram