We were recently working on a client project that involved usage of the Shopp plugin for WordPress. Shopp is a fairly feature rich commercial plugin targeted towards users who want an easy way to sell products or digital downloads from their website.

While playing with it, it became apparent that the plugin didn’t support integration with any SEO plugins, such as the All-In-One SEO Pack. In fact, while scanning the support forums for Shopp, it seemed that other people were looking for this feature too.

So, BraveNewCode to the rescue. We whipped up a quick little proof of concept tonight to make it work using the WordPress shortcode API. To use it, simply add a shortcode into each Shopp product description, similar to this:


[shoppseo title="This is some title" desc="This is some description"]


The shortcode name is shoppseo, and the relevant parameters are title and desc.

To use the plugin, download the following file, copy it to your /wp-content/plugins folder and rename it to shopp-seo.php. At that point you should be able to activate it from the administration panel. You’ll also need the All-In-One SEO Pack installed and configured.

I imagine this feature will eventually make it into the Shopp plugin, but until then people are free to use this plugin. If you’re interested in anything else we do here at BraveNewCode, bounce around and take a look or follow us on Twitter.

We were flattered to hear from our awesome hosting provider, ServerBeach that they’d recently written a post about WPtouch, thanks guys!

ServerBeach Rocks

We’re honoured because to us, ServerBeach is one helluva hosting company. Fast, courteous response times to the very minor issues we’ve faced, extremely smooth and fast performance coupled with exceptional stability and capability have been beyond enjoyable. Since choosing to move over every one of our websites to their services a few months back from Media Temple and a string of nightmares (poor service, performance, security issues) we’ve not turned our heads.

We’re not affiliates and aren’t getting a penny for this praise. We just wanted to take the time to holler back some praise for a host that’s noticed us and our work.

I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship, doll.

We’ve just relaunched our website, and we think it sets the stage for the things we have planned for 2010. In this post we explore some of those things, which will hopefully answer the many e-mail, Twitter, and blog comment questions we’ve had in the last 6 weeks or so.

WPtouch 2.0

We’ve posted here a few times in the past about the release of WPtouch 2.0, and each time we’ve done so we anticipated it being released far sooner. The reason for its delays are many, but the good news is that it’s actively being worked on now.

Re-Write

We’re undertaking a complete re-write for 2.0, a necessary step to set the stage for multi-Theme support and some of the other features we have planned. We’ve learned much about the right way to build a WordPress plugin over the past few years, and want to start fresh to make sure that 2.0 is a model example of efficiency and poetry in code and thoughtful care in design.

Around The Corner

With the impending release of an Apple touch tablet (and many other touch tablets) and new updates to touch mobile phone software (Android 2.1 and iPhone 4.0) we’re hoping these new products and features enable us to do more with WPtouch. Rest assured that new capabilities will be added as things develop.

Support Forums

The goal in tearing apart the forums was also for a variety of reasons, but the most important being that we’re moving towards having a single account which you can use to post in the forums and on this site, and in the future any other BraveNewCode related services, sites, etc.

Secondly, the entire design for the Support Forums is being updated to reflect the new website, and until we settled on the website’s overall look, features and layout we couldn’t move too much on the Forums.

Expect them to be up and live again within the coming weeks.

WordTwit, Integrity

We’ll also be hard at work on improving WordTwit, our popular Twitter plugin for WordPress, and developing Integrity, our WordPress security plugin. Due to some of the recent work by the WordPress team it remains to be seen whether a plugin like Integrity is really needed, so we’ll be watching that development.

Shhhhhh Secrets!

Many of the things we’re planning require a little secrecy. As such we’ll post on the website when we’re ready to reveal juicy details, but you’re best served following us on Twitter to get first dibs on news, beta releases, and more goodies.

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit around these here parts. Dale and I are pleased to finally pull the curtain back on our brand new website and let everyone finally take a look. The original brainstorming and planning behind this new version started months ago down in Punta Cuna. While we were always happy with our old site, we strongly feel that this new site will be able to grow at the same pace as the other aspects of our business.

Website Features

When we started re-architecting this site, one of the crucial aspects during development was that it had to be easy for us to manage. Being only a two person company, we could easily spend a good portion of every week managing and maintaining our website and internet presence. While we wanted a fully functional website, we also didn’t want to be a slave to the maintenance of it.

So to that end here is a brief description of some of the cooler features that are under the hood here.

Flickr Driven Portfolios

If you head over to our porfolio or our product pages, you’ll see we’ve added a lot more information. One area that we’ve beefed up is the product and portfolio image galleries. In the past, we manually added the images using the WordPress system, and while that worked, it wasn’t very fast or efficient. On this new site, we’ve tied all the image galleries into Flickr, so they are completely managed and updated using Flickr and associated tools such as Flickr uploader. All the titles and descriptions for each image come from Flickr as well, and given Flickr’s AJAX content editing interface, it is a real snap to edit content on each of the images.

Remote Plugin Information

Most of our plugins are updated every week or so, and keeping our website up to date with regards to the changes in each version used to be time consuming. On our last website, we finally started pulling some information in from the content on WordPress.org, and have enhanced that even further with this version. On all our plugin pages the download links, change log, last time the product was updated, and associated file sizes are all updated remotely from information over at WordPress.org. From our side, as soon as we check in a new plugin version on the WordPress plugin repository, the associated information will automatically update itself on BraveNewCode.com.

Enhanced Fonts

It’s a real shame that the Internet has essentially been limited to only a handful of web-safe fonts. While there are various technologies that allow the use of additional fonts, we finally came across one that we wanted to try on BraveNewCode: Cufón. As you can see, most of the headings are now in a dynamically generated font called Steinem. We felt that this font added to the look and feel of our website, and fit in well with the spirit behind the content.

jQuery Love

You’ll find sprinkles of jQuery effects and ajax around the site (for example the nice tooltips that pop up on download buttons), all of which was added to make navigation easier and to add some UI gloss to the website.

Jenga: More Than Just A Game

We had a little fun updating the content in a few areas, as evidenced by our spiffy new page talking about our website design and development practices. While we take pride in the work we do, we also like having fun while doing it.

Support Forums

We know that many of our plugin users have been aching for support while the support forums have been down. We apologize again, but it’s the only way we can truly complete our client work, continue to develop our plugins, and finish the overhaul to the forums themselves.

Still More To Do

Not everything is completed with the site revamp, and we’ll be adding more in the coming weeks ahead. Enhancements to the blog, portfolio and product areas, as well as the addition of user accounts here at BraveNewCode.

The New Frontier

We still have a lot to roll out in the next few months here at BraveNewCode, but our new website was a pretty big bullet point on our to-do list, and we’re happy to finally cross it off and share the end result with everyone. By all means, drop us a comment and let us know what you think. Look forward to some more great stuff from The BraveNewCode team in the near future. Happy surfing!

A few months ago we solicited feedback on features people would like to see in future versions of WordTwit. It’s been a while, but we finally managed to sneak one in. As of WordTwit 2.3.0, there’s now a management pane on the write/edit post page that shows the Tweet status. If a Tweet has been published for that entry, it’ll be indicated there. In addition, there’s also a new button that allows a person to Retweet an entry that has already been Tweeted, or to force a Tweet on an old entry that has already been published. And wait, one more thing! There’s a real-time preview of what the Tweet will look like when it’s published, that way you’ll know exactly what’s going out the door if you press any of the magic buttons.

Now that the management pane is in place and hooked up, we’ll be adding a few new features (such as hash tags) there in the future. In addition, we’ve also updated the documentation for WordTwit 2.3.0 to provide help with installations on WordPress MU.

If you install WordTwit 2.3.0 and run into any problems, please drop a comment and let us know. Happy Tweeting!

Update – we just pushed out a minor update, 2.3.1. It has all the goodies mentioned above, plus support for the is.gd url shortener and also the ability to view the number of times a bit.ly linked has been clicked (if you use bit.ly).

James Higgs:

“There are a number of trigger phrases that people use to try to prevent you focusing on the detail of a project and back to nice, sweeping, high-level thinking, and ‘that’s executional’ is one of them. I think it is supposed to mean that the particular detail you’re focusing on is not central to the service under discussion and is something that can be worked out at a later date.

This attitude frustrates me so much because I think you make great services by obsessing over details. I think one of the ways to make awful services is by developing some pure, abstract concept in isolation from how people will actually use it. To me, the concept is contained in the execution.

I don’t mean to suggest that every detail must be worked out at planning sessions, but I do think that digging into detail is a very good way of examining how sound the service is. The way users interact with services is often in very small transactions, and the detail of those transactions is vital to engaging the user.

I can never shake the feeling that people dislike getting into details because that’s when service design gets hard, as if it’s the concept that is always right and that the details can be massaged and shaped to fit. Coming up with a grandiose plan is relatively easy, but working out how much of the plan can actually work in detail is much harder. I think we could work much more efficiently if we got into detail sooner.”

I agree with the entire article and its sentiments.

Things are still up in the air, but it looks like BraveNewCode is going to be involved in organizing a big Vancouver WordPress event: WordCamp Vancouver. BraveNewCode was a prime sponsor for the last large WordCamp in British Columbia, WordCamp Whistler, and will most likely play a large part in the next iteration of WordCamp in British Columbia.

Dale spoke at WordCamp Whistler about WPtouch back in its infancy, and I spoke about mobile blogging in general down at WordCamp Portland a few months ago. Chances are that one of us will be speaking at WordCamp Vancouver, but it’s too soon to tell who it will be or what the topic will be (if it happens).

The tentative date for WordCamp Vancouver is on June 12th, 2010, and it will most likely be in downtown Vancouver. For more information, check out the official WordCamp Vancouver website, or follow WordCamp YVR on Twitter.

‘Tis the season to be upgrading. WordTwit and WPtouch both see some last minute gifts in new releases today, here’s a rundown of what’s been changed/added.

WordTwit 2.2.5

A small update to WordTwit adds bonafide WordPress 2.9+ support. Minor bugs and fixes were baked in as well.

WPtouch 1.9.7

We lauded a couple of the new feature adds on Twitter yesterday, and things progressed well enough that a release of the new version could be made today. 1.9.7 adds a couple of oft-requested things, post-thumbnails instead of calendar icons and the ability to change the font used for H2 on the post listings, post and page titles.

For Post Thumbnails we perform some eye candy additons for you: You just pick your thumbnail, and we add the rounded corners and reflection automagically. The admin options for the post listings are now: Calendar Icons (default), Post Thumbnails, Post Thumbnails with random images (to fill the posts that don’t have thumbnails associated) and show neither (for those minimalists out there).

Instead of trying to describe all of this in detail in a post, I’ve whipped up a quick video to go over setting up the new features.

From all of us at BraveNewCode, have a safe and happy holidays everyone and we’ll see ya in the new year/decade!

For those of you who haven’t seen it, we’ve also been tinkering with a BuddyPress plugin called BuddyPress Geo.