There’s a groundswell of anticipation growing around the launch of WPtouch 2.0, a major update to our popular mobile plugin for WordPress. One of the hotly anticipated features (and arguably, most important) is the addition of themes. We’ve written extensively in the past about the various ways we’ve approached the idea of adding themes support to WPtouch, notably how hard it’s been to come up with a way that both:
- Makes it easy for users to choose from different themes and set them up quickly, for those who want an easy, fast mobile solution that looks and works great…
- While also providing a framework for those who want to customize themes, and even build their own from scratch
The two different paths are indeed very different, both from a user perspective and a coding perspective… ensuring both paths were well-designed was a feat.
We opted for a brand new admin panel to help solve some the issues we faced, and we think the combination of vertical/horizontal tabs for navigating the WPtouch settings alleviates our concerns.
There are also other great things about WPtouch 2.0, and we wanted to share a little more about what they are today.
The BraveNewCode Way
We pride ourselves and our business on providing quality. Quality means different things in different contexts, to different people, but to us it translates into our users and customers feeling knowing that they are working with something that’s had a great deal of thought, care, consideration and work put into it. They should feel confident (and if we’re lucky) even delighted to have it in their arsenal of tools that run their websites, business, etc.
Because there’s a paid version of 2.0 (we’ll be releasing this first, but indeed a free version will be released later as well) we wanted to ensure that the highest degree of quality we could muster was at the foundation of the work.
We do not take the growth of this plugin lightly. Since its become one of the most popular plugins for WordPress (was in the top spot just the other day, and downloaded over 700,000 times!) we’ve thought deeply about what it would mean to grow the plugin in a good way, extend its capabilities and the talents of WordPress as a publishing platform. It’s always tempting to want to throw a price tag on something like this that’s popular, but we’ve always felt that if WPtouch was going to have a paid version it would have to do more, much more.
As we move into an age where mobile internet usage is fast becoming as important (and maybe soon, more important) than desktop access, WPtouch has the potential to be something powerful for website owners to publish content for mobile visitors.
We put a fair amount of critical thought against the ideas we generate to discriminate which we want to act upon. Both Duane and myself are constantly generating new ideas and it’s a great asset as a small company to be able to creatively generate so much possibility. Though it can also be a lynch: we must filter these ideas, and determine which are valuable to act upon in an immediate manner and which should be shelved for ’someday’.
And we don’t always agree, but I’d hate to have a partner whom did not carry a different vision. One of our strengths is looking at and approaching things differently, it’s something we work on all the time at improving and synthesizing.
So arriving at what WPtouch can become and how it should get there has been a journey lasting nearly a year, and that doesn’t include the time it’s taken building it.
Support
When WPtouch was a fairly small plugin, it wasn’t very hard to support it. But given the popularity of WPtouch and the growing user base, more users are looking for help and support. Right now there are two options: the community forums on WordPress.org and the Support Forums on this site.
While we drop by our free forums whenever we can to answer questions, often ongoing client commitments limit our availability on the forums. To that end, the paid version of WPtouch Pro will allow us to dedicate the time to provide full support in our forums for paid users, addressing issues in a timely, comprehensive manner. We’ll also be supplying supporting documentation based on the WPtouch codebase which will help developers and users who wish to make their own enhancements or customizations.
A New Hope
The most frequent areas of request for WPtouch are compatibility with other WordPress plugins, and having more theme customizability.
Users want to see their favourite plugins work well with WPtouch, and want to be able to brand and customize WPtouch in ways that are not currently available to them without some form of fixed modification which will not survive plugin updates.
WPtouch 2.0 aims to take care of both of these concerns, and we think we’ve come up with some enterprising ways of doing so. There are a slew of other enhancements, changes, features and additions to 2.0, but we’re focusing this post on a couple of things which we know many users want to know about.
Other Plugins
It’s not sustainable for us to try and support the integration of thousands upon thousands of plugins available for WordPress. it’s also not going to work if we simply tell our users to ask developers of other plugins to find a way to make them work with our plugin without adding anything to WPtouch to make it easier to do so.
With 2.0 there’s an entirely new codebase, and with it Duane’s packed in a variety of ways that ensure WPtouch is pluggable, extensible and modifiable by WPtouch theme authors and plugin developers. We hope that with these changes plugin authors can quickly and easily add modified functionality to their plugins for WPtouch, or create entirely new plugins which can hook into and provide functionality for WPtouch itself and/or its themes. It’s a brave attempt from our side at solving one of the things we (and our users) have struggled with most.
It doesn’t mean we won’t build in some out-of-the-box support for various plugins, but it does mean we want other plugin developers to feel empowered to come up with solutions for their products when working with WPtouch, in much the same way they do for WordPress itself and desktop themes.
After all, WPtouch is now becoming a mobile theming platform, and less a plugin that will give your site a generic, Apple-esque mobile application appearance. Because of this, our focus will be on creating innovative themes that harness the power of the devices they’ll be shown on. We can’t both do that and find ways for these themes to work with every plugin out there. It’s not practical and it’s not reasonable for us. That said, wherever possible, we will work together with other developers to ensure they have the tools and information necessary to make their plugin(s) compatible with WPtouch.
New WPtouch Themes
WPtouch 2.0 ushers in a whole new theme mechanism which allows for theme switching in the admin. WPtouch 2.0 will ship with a few themes, and we plan on having many more down the road. When you install and activate WPtouch 2.0 you’ll now find an admin panel that defines a global vs. theme options ideology.
There are global WPtouch features and settings which apply to general setup and all themes, while a new active theme tab generated by themes themselves govern all the settings to do with that particular theme only.
We’ve worked hard to flesh out and distinguish what a theme needs to be able to do and access from what the plugin itself needs to govern and control. It’s been an exhausting process— ensuring that themes can be flexible while also having a foundation to build upon that saves themers time and energy building out their dream mobile site.
Custom Themes
We hope this new approach inspires others to create custom themes themselves, and we’ve set the stage with a new Skeleton theme (a theme template with the basic features, hooks and guts needed to start building out a custom theme). The Skeleton will start out as a theme that resembles the current 1.9 theme in many ways, and we’ll likely grow and expand upon the Skeleton over time, or have other Skeleton templates.
Down the road we can also see people wanting to share the themes they create with others, and that would be great to see. Our focus for now, however, will be ensuring that those wishing to endeavor to build a theme with WPtouch have the tools, guidance and support in doing so, and that begins with Skeleton.
Custom themes can do everything our own themes do, and of course go off in their own unique directions. In fact, we’re building all of our themes off the same Skeleton, too. Really nothing we’ve done or do is required from a theme standpoint, so creatively a themer can leverage our work and code, or roll 100% custom if they so choose.
When the WPtouch plugin is updated, all custom changes, settings, themes, etc., remain the same.
Any new features that can be taken advantage of will not affect or break a custom theme, or any theme, for the matter. Custom/user themes live outside WPtouch’s plugin directory, while separation between the global WPtouch admin settings and theme features ensures a smooth environment for custom work.
Themers can add new theme functionality provided by plugin updates easily if they want, or ignore the changes (they will most likely be added to the Skeleton and documented, and will be easy to see in action).
If capabilities are depreciated in favour of others at some point, they won’t be removed, so if you build a theme the day 2.0 is released it’ll always work with WPtouch. Wherever possible, we want those building and working with WPtouch to feel confident that they can do what they want to do without the fear that they’ll have their efforts quashed with subsequent releases.
Summary
To summarize: plugin features we add will not affect the functionality of a working theme, in much the same way that the core of WordPress adds functionality without breaking existing themes (for the most part, if they’re coded well).
Themes are user-selectable in the admin, and you can copy a theme to your custom folder to start editing its files if you so choose.
Support for 3rd party plugins will be handled not by direct plugin support, but rather through the ability to hook into WPtouch, and add/modify/remove a plugin’s functionality for better compatibility with WPtouch.
We may create modules that help perform some of this 3rd party functionality, but we’re hoping that developers themselves take to the streets themselves.
One More Thing…
Our WPtouch 2.0 themes will support web-app mode.
For iPhone/iPod touch visitors this means they can bookmark your website to their home-screen and your website will automatically be saved as a self-contained application which will run in fullscreen mode.
This means no address bar at the top of the screen, nor navigation bar at the bottom. Just your mobile site, in full and glorious view.
All posts, pages, comments, etc., are handled with Ajax. This means a super-fast and highly-optimized custom website experience for your website visitors, as native as one can get to a native application on the iPhone/iPod touch.
You can even define a loading image (the screenshot at the top of the page is just that!) that will show while your website fires up!
Launch Details, Beta
We haven’t finalized launch details or the beta release, but we’re getting closer everyday to be able to do so.
We would like to reveal some demos of the plugin in action, and announce release information soon. We’re excited about it all but first need a few more pieces to fall into place, so hang tight!
Pricing and other details will be a part of those announcements.
The best place to get sneak previews is to follow BraveNewCode on Twitter.
To be notified when WPtouch 2.0 will be available, visit WPtouch.com and use the sign-up form.
Dale Mugford 
Duane Storey 
The BNC Team 
