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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. David Moody

    http://WordpressWebmaster.net

    October 8th, 2011

    Recently I have come to terms with believing WPtouch it is the wrong approach to mobile site delivery. The mobile world has launched so far beyond just an iPad or iPhone that it does not make sense for the common blogger to use WPtouch but rather it is better to start rolling out site designs that are responsive to screen sizes. Forget themes that are for just a few devices, don’t you agree? I just dropped a quick video to start the discussion:
    http://wordpresswebmaster.net/2011/10/03/responsive-design-wordpress-themes/

    Perhaps the next version of WPtouch would abandon the user agent approach and adobe a responsive to screen size design approach?

    Thoughts anyone?

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      October 8th, 2011

      Responsive themes are great! It’s the ideal delivery, really. But not all themes can be responsively altered- and it’s quite a few years away before responsive designs become the norm.

      WPtouch fills the gap here. And it’s not just for a handful of devices— WPtouch works on over 100 devices these days, and serves mobile pages to roughly 85% of mobile device traffic on the web.

      And while responsive designs are ideal, they’re not always implemented well, and can still be cumbersome. Serving desktop sized content and stripping away elements with CSS doesn’t stop most resources from being sent to the devices.

      I think there’s room for, and times where these different approaches are more appropriate.

      I’m not sure there’s an easy solution for a responsive design plugin- if you’re modifying the desktop theme to be presented on mobile you have to know what the elements are in the theme to adjust them.

  2. David Moody

    http://WordpressWebmaster.net

    October 8th, 2011

    Hey Dale,

    Thank you for the response Dale and that is awesome that WPtouch works on ~100 devices! I do agree that responsive design is great but still evolving. You guys give a lot into the development and WordPress communities. Many thanks to all of the good folks at BraveNewCode.

    I do feel that when doing e-commerce on mobile in this present device environment, optimizing for the major smart phones and iPad is very important. At some point the shear number of screens out there I believe will push us into a greater need for some type of responsive design. I’m just starting to look into it more. Keep up the good work and thanks again for the response.

    • David Moody

      http://WordpressWebmaster.net

      October 8th, 2011

      Dale, I have clipped your above response to my WPtouch and responsive design comment and added it to my blog post on my site to give readers the BNC perspective.

      My very best, David

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      October 8th, 2011

      The only other snafu with responsive design is that it usually forces the visitor into that viewing mode— while some visitors would prefer to see the desktop site, especially on devices like iPhone and Android where their browsers are quite capable.

      Mobile e-commerce is definitely a newly emerging hot topic— but it’s an expensive endeavour to have a mobile store developed, and/or find a shop design that works well responsively.

      I think well-done mobile themes for e-commerce that reduce friction and make it enjoyable to browse and buy on the mobile device will win— so whether that’s done via a theme like WPtouch or responsive design, it’s not the how that matters— only whether visitors/customers are enjoying it and finding it easy to use on their devices.

      It’s great to see the growing approaches and thoughtfulness around mobile websites— when we first delivered WPtouch 4 years ago none of this stuff was even being dreamed of!

  3. Schnäppchen

    http://www.schnappilette.de

    October 17th, 2011

    Hi,

    Can you please give an estimation about the Release Date for the Version which can handle custom Post types?
    Is a Hack available to activate it in the actual pro Version?

    Best regards,
    Manuel

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      October 17th, 2011

      Current customers have added custom
      post type support themselves, and their are some support forum threads with assistance.

      We’ll be adding native support in WPtouch Pro in the 2.5 release, due within the month.

  4. Axel

    http://www.online-softskill-trainings.com/de/

    October 23rd, 2011

    Your plugin is one of my favorites, it’s easy to use and it generates a ton of value for all of my websites! Thanks for your free version and the great work you are doing! Keep on doing it.

    • Dale Mugford

      BNC Design Guru

      October 23rd, 2011

      Thanks Axel.

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