Did You Know?: The Origins of WPtouch

Did you know WPtouch was first created as a mobile theme for matthewgood.org?

WPtouch was built as part of a project designer and developer, Dale Mugford, took on to create a site for Canadian musician, Matthew Good. It was 2007 and the project entailed building several themes for matthewgood.org. Dale decided a mobile theme should be included as a surprise add-on. Software engineer, Duane Storey, was enlisted to help out on the job, and the roots for the founding of BraveNewCode began to form.

As Duane recalls, “I was actually working on the last pieces in a hotel room in Ottawa, and then I flew out to Toronto to meet Dale and for both of us to go to one of Matt’s shows at Massey Hall.  I think it was the morning after when we met Matt in his hotel room and showed him how it all worked.”

In 2008, WPtouch became available in the WordPress Plugin Directory and by mid-2009 was approaching 100,000 downloads. Towards the end of 2009 the plugin also became available at wordpress.com.

Today WPtouch is one of the top 10 most downloaded plugins in the directory having been downloaded over 3,500,000 times, in March 2012 it was found to be one of the top 20 plugins used across 30,000 WordPress sites by Presstrends. In addition, recent research we performed indicates it is used by over 30% of the top blogs using WordPress.

Next month we’re celebrating the 4th anniversary of BraveNewCode, founded on a relationship  that began with the development of our flagship plugin, WPtouch. Check out our BraveNewCode timeline on Storify to find out more about how we’ve grown through the years.