Today is also another really special day — today is day 1 of BraveNewCode’s second year, which sort of makes it BraveNewCode’s birthday I guess. Hard to believe Dale and I have been officially “at it” for a year now. Looking back a year ago, Dale had incorporated the company while doing a few small projects, and I was still stuck doing the daily grind in Vancouver. Sometime in the fall I jumped on board, lending a bit of development experience here and there where I could.

By around October, Dale and I were doing quite a bit of business with BraveNewCode, to the point where I really felt like I had two jobs — one was my day job in Vancouver, and one was BraveNewCode, which I typically worked on in the evenings and on weekends. I’ll not lie and say it wasn’t hard sometimes — I remember a few times where I was completely burnt out from lack of sleep, but I knew that Dale and I were working on something pretty amazing.

Around December it finally looked like we had enough work on the horizon such that I could quit my day job in Vancouver and join BraveNewCode full time. January 15th was my last full day of work, and on January 18th I moved back to my home town, a little picturesque farming community about an hour from Vancouver, to work on BraveNewCode full time.

It’s been about five months since then, and things are only looking better. At WordCamp San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg announced three of the top WordPress plugins, two of which were developed here at BraveNewCode — not bad for a company that was only 11 months old! We’re definitely grateful for everyone’s support, and promise a lot of great things still yet to come from BraveNewCode.

So today, while you people in Canada crack a few beers in celebration of Canada (or whatever other festivity of yours warrants a few drinks), Dale and I will probably be tossing a few back in celebration of our first year of business. So happy birthday Canada, and happy birthday BraveNewCode!

We’ve crushed a few dozen bugs, added a new feature called ‘Skins’, among other new features, and have totally re-designed the WPtouch admin panel.

This week we hope to shore up the last of the new feature additions and push out another beta release. Once tested 1.9 will be served fresh to everyone. We will likely release 1.9 and follow it up with point releases that will add (among other things) languages, new skins, and additional WordPress plugin compatibility support. We’ll have a complete listing of changes for 1.9 posted here soon.

WordTwit

WordTwit will also see an update soon, with more support for other shortening services and hashes, as well as kill some bugs.

Transporter

Our as yet unreleased plugin Transporter (one click WordPress database/file backup and site migration) will be something we work to have released as a public alpha in July.

The road looks bright for BraveNewCode plugins, so keep your thumbs out and hitch a ride when our updates swing by your town.

After scanning the blogosphere this morning, it became apparent that many musicians and artists are currently leveraging MySpace as a means to reach their fans and promote their material. Obviously, if MySpace were to fold, that avenue would disappear, which for a small artist could be rather catastrophic.

Given that Dale and I have a lot of experience in the music industry, namely with the previous work we’ve done on both Matthew Good and Jessie Farrell’s website (which caused us to both to be nominated for Country music awards last year), we thought maybe this might be an opportunity for us to get our feet wet again. So to that end, we want to offer a special deal to musicians looking to have their own personal websites developed.

At this point in time we’re looking at starting some new projects in the month of August. We figure that if we can get a couple musicians who would like to move to having their own websites, we could potentially merge some of the development together such that we can exploit some economies of scale, thus saving everyone a bit of money. Some of the cool things we’ve done in the past that are music related are:

• We developed one of the first iPhone integrations with the iTunes music store, such that music purchases could be made on the iPhone in real-time while viewing the site
• We’ve integrated lists of future concert dates into deployments
• We’ve done merchandise integration into a custom eCommerce solution
• We’ve integrated social network tools such as Facebook and Twitter into sites

In addition, we’re currently working on some exciting new projects in the realm of ticketing and touring, so obviously we can potentially tie all of that together as well, hopefully providing a really unique music experience catered to each individual artist.

So if you’re a musician and you’ve been holding off an setting up your own site, perhaps now is a great time to start planning the next phase of your online identify. If you’re interested in talking to us a bit more about this, please drop us a line via our contact form and we can go from there.

Beta Busting

To say that things have changed from Beta 1 through 7 would be an understatement! Thanks to great help in the support forums from those of you who’ve been actively testing the betas we’re approaching Beta 8, a release that will see the addition of skins, a series of mods to the default appearance of WPtouch (the above image shows ‘Lavender’ and ‘Frog’). Skins can be easily selected in the admin, and will add more colorful branding to WPtouch. Skins will be great for those that like the default theme’s layout but are looking for a stronger color branding that resembles their site’s theme. We’ll add other skins too.

Bug Squish

We’ve killed several bugs over the beta releases, and added a slew of features both visible and under the hood. We hope that with each successive release there are fewer issues as a whole, and the beta program will help immensely with that.

WordPress Version Support

Due to father time, we’ll be dropping support for WordPress 2.3, 2.5 and 2.6.1 – 2.6.4. We’d prefer to stick with support for secure versions of WordPress, and given that as of WordPress 2.7 you can stay up to date with the latest WordPress version simply by clicking a button- there’s no excuse not to stay current. We’ll be incorporating all the latest and greatest features, and won’t be held back from including things like nested & paginated comments, features which are harder to implement when you’re supporting versions of WordPress over 18 months old.

What’s Been Done

Here’s a rough list of what’s been accomplished so far:

• Changed default theme styles for images (now load as background images)
• Made sprites for small theme images to load quicker
• Added all-new variations on the default theme as style selections (Frog, Sea, Lavender, Sunkissed)
• Added jQuery color picker in the admin hex areas for easier style selections
• Fix for Categories, Tags & Login links not working in some mobile browsers (Android, etc)
• Combined CSS files and minified javascript files
• Updated Ajax Upload script to 3.2
• Moved adsense.php to include folder
• Updated screenshots for new designs
• Fixed an issue where excerpts could contain too much spacing
• New admin styling, plugin support for WordPress 2.6.5 sites
• Revised header area styling
• Search now floats overtop the headerbar
• Refined drop down button
• Footer switch link now a part of Core
• No longer using the_content_rss() for excerpts, created a custom function which handles it nicely
• Home link in menu drop down now respects the logo/bookmark icon choice
• Fixed the way javascript is called for a elements, should work better in other mobile browsers
• Moved several images into the core images folder, building more dependency on CoreTheme
• Fix for custom page icons not showing up on pages
• Added link to online icon generator in admin
• Fixed device-width mobileSafari bug
• Added style declaration for images in comments
• More theme changes/enhancements, particularly in the header, footer
• Added ‘My Account’ button in the sub-header for logged in users replacing ‘Logout’
• Fixed issue where chosen pages and icons did not appear in the drop down
• Removed 404 image with English text in it, replaced it with localized 404 text
• Updated fancybox to compressed v1.2.1
• Fixed a few areas that had text not yet localized, improperly coded
• Removed depreciated or unused functions from previous releases
• Removed ability to disable jQuery; WPtouch Exclusive mode should fix JS issues
• Added native select for Tags
• Updated compatibility code (Various WordPress install scenarios) ~ thanks to Will Norris for the suggestions
• Modified AJAX calls
• Made it so administration CSS/JS only loads on WPtouch page
• Fixed a variety of scenarios where paths to files and images were broken
• Updated social bookmarking icons
• More preparation for WPtouch 1.9 and 5 languages
• Preparation for WPtouch 2.0 and themes support (based on CoreTheme)
• Fixed switch link issue where regular theme switch link was broken
• Major re-writes of theme files, css for simplicity, CoreTheme
• Updates to default theme style

What’s To Come

We’ve still got a couple more skins to do, and then the plugin will be shipped off for localization. We’re looking into a couple methods for easy localization, so stay tuned if you offered to help and we’ll soon deliver to you the information on how to get started- we want to make sure the English text is settled so that it doesn’t have to be changed often and require revision from translators.

Beta 8 should be available this week, and will include the new skins for testing.

Several fairly exciting things happened during Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word Presentation. First, Matt showed a slide which displayed some of the new profile information that is going to be coming to WordPress.org — BraveNewCode has actually been helping with that effort, so it was great to finally have some of it shown to everyone. Second, Matt displayed a list of the coolest three WordPress plugins, as voted by people on his Twitter stream. The first plugin that was shown, the third coolest plugin, was actually WordTwit. Dale and I were both pretty floored seeing it up there in all it’s glory on Matt’s slide in front of about 700 people. The second coolest plugin was a related posts plugin. And then, Matt flipped to the number one coolest WordPress plugin, none other than our WPtouch iPhone plugin. So, we walked away with the #1 and #3 spots for the coolest WordPress plugins — a pretty exciting event for us to be sure. A big thanks to everyone who voted for us.

Later that night we attended the social down at Automattic’s new offices at Pier 38. I had the chance to meet a lot of great people in person, many of which I had only talked to online before. The bar was completely open, so most people did fairly well in the liquor department. Afterwards all of us found a little hole-in-the-wall diner and had a nice greasy meal to close out the evening. I’ve been really enjoying guacomole lately, and I managed to find a hamburger that had a healthy dose of the stuff on it.

Dale travelled back late last night and today I’m going to be making the long journey back home, then we’ll both rest up and get back on the saddles.

A big thanks to everyone involved in putting the event together- it was a great time and we’ll be back next year.

Check it out!

(Blip.tv embed, click the image to open and view)

What We Need

We’re looking to have a small group of dedicated testers provide feedback and use case issues over the course of successive beta releases.

All new beta releases will be automatically shown in the new WPtouch admin panel as they become available, and are required to be installed via FTP only. So if you don’t have access to your WordPress install using FTP, please don’t attempt to download and use the beta, or participate in this program.

WPtouch 1.9 Beta Availability

If you’re interested in joining, read up on the program thread in the forums.

Please read the following on using WPtouch betas:

Important!

- A beta is a beta: by their very nature these releases are less stable than our traditional updates.

- Please check the Support Forum section for these releases for the known issues BEFORE upgrading or attempting to use them. They’ll outline things we know aren’t working properly or are unknown.

- Please don’t post feature requests in the Support threads for the betas- we’re focusing on making these releases stable and reliable under a variety of WordPress install scenarios, and if we add features in successive releases they were already planned- so you might get what want anyways : )

- As well, don’t e-mail us about issues with the betas; always post to the appropriate thread in the Support forums (i.e. WPtouch 1.9 beta 1, WPtouch 1.9 beta 2, etc.)

Since 1.8.9.1 There’s been over 200 commits to the repository, and almost every file has been modified and given a little love.

You can find out more on the changes in each beta by visiting the Forums.

We were playing around with a little script the other day that would sanity check our own plugins whenever we were about to do a check-in into the repository. There are some common errors we’ve hit a few times during development, so we created the script to try and locate those. It worked so well in fact that we decided to analyze the whole WordPress plugin repository.

The end result is available at http://plugincheck.bravenewcode.com. The HTML files are auto-generated, and will be updated from time to time. It’s really hard to account for all the variations in coding style, so undoubtedly there will be a few false positives in that list. Given that there are nearly 10,000 plugins there, we really don’t have the time to manually edit the content to remove those. That being said, hopefully the plugin checker will be a valuable resource for people that want to try and improve their plugins.

The most common problem appears to be the hardcoding of wp-content in the files. As of WordPress 2.6, you can not only rename wp-content to something else, but you can also move it out of the WordPress tree. If you hardcode wp-content in your code, that feature will no longer function, and will undoubtedly cause errors. The correct solution is to use the WP_CONTENT_DIR definition in your code if it’s defined.

Another common error is that some plugins access the database directly using mysql_connect. The correct way to handle database activity is to use the WordPress database object, $wpdb. Also, to prevent against MySQL injection attacks, developers should use the $wpdb->prepare function to automatically escape all strings.

We’re definitely open to feedback regarding the plugin checker. Right now it’s just a part-time interest, so there are no guarantees that we’ll keep running it. But while it’s up, enjoy!

Long Overdue, But Worth The Wait

It’s been a long time coming, but we’re getting close enough to WPtouch 2.0 to talk about some of its features and enhancements, trials and tribulations, and what’s in store beyond the 2.0 milestone.

Though not due out for another 3-4 weeks or more, we fully expect to have both the WPtouch 1.9 and WPtouch 2.0 releases available sooner in beta form as there are many under-the-hood changes which we’d like our loyal users to test out first before we launch it far and wide.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester send us an e-mail and we’ll put you on the list.

Nearing 100,000 Downloads on WordPress.org

While we’re technically well past that mark if you combine our separate site stats with WordPress.org stats, we’re quite excited to have the repository downloads nearing the 100k mark.

To celebrate, we’ll be having a little contest for WPtouch 2.0 in the order of theme development and the possibility of winning an iPod touch for your efforts. But more on that in a post to come soon, this one’s about the roadmap : )

Where We Were

With WPtouch we’ve revolutionized the possibilities of delivering a full-featured WordPress website on a touch mobile device, all without the experience affecting or depending upon your existing theme. Make changes to your desktop theme, and WPtouch won’t be any worse for wear. Change plugins, WordPress versions, and even upgrade WPtouch and have your settings and custom icons saved.

We’ve added a ton of features over the revision cycles, all while hardening the plugin and resolving many bugs and issues as they cropped up.

We originally thought we’d get to 2.0 by the fall of last year, but that quickly became impossible, and a little impromptu on our part. Instead, we focused on incremental evolutionary growth of the plugin such that when the moniker ‘2.0′ was applied, it would be a logical, well-thought-out, destined release which made sense to our users and left little to complain about (we shoot high, you know).

Where We Are

Currently we’re at that crossroad with the plugin where it needs to grow in a couple directions, and we’re aiming to do just that with the next couple of releases.

What’s Lacking

Currently the two major areas we see the plugin lacking in are internationalization and theming. Let’s tackle internationalization, first.

As with all plugins for WordPress, they should be internationalized, and it’s not that hard to do so from a technical perspective. What is hard to do in our case is make sure that the plugin is fully internationalized in a stable manner— i.e. that we don’t change or add to the text in the admin panel and the theme files too much.

At current, there is still some considerable fluctuation in these departments and instead of having our internationalization team constantly working to revise translations, we’re trying to settle on the text beforehand so there’s little in the way of revisions or changes to language.

Our goal is to ship WPtouch 1.9 with 5 languages supported, and ship WPtouch 2.0 with at least 10, maybe 12. From there we hope other translators jump in and add more.

Themes

Currently WPtouch alludes to having support for Themes (what with our ‘wptouch/themes’ directory and all) but it in fact does not support multiple templates at all, just the default one.

It was always our intention to add user-selectable theme support, but there’s been some hang-ups and snags along the way in doing this, so we decided instead to focus on the heart of the plugin first before we continued on theme support development.

We wanted to support multiple Themes for obvious reasons, but we also wanted to do it in such a way that made it simple for our users and other developers to create themes and easily share them with others.

To make this possible we’ve gone to the whiteboard several times in order to figure out the best method to meet these criteria:

• Themes must be able to be easily added, and selected
• Themes must survive updates to WPtouch and WordPress without issue
• It must be very simple for a developer or someone who wants to make modifications to the Default theme to be able to do so without breaking their website or WPtouch itself
• Themes capability must allow for and include an easy way for us to add new features and for Theme developers to add the features to their Themes without much muss and fuss
• Theme support can’t be bulky- it’s got to be just as fast and efficient as WPtouch currently is

If some of those criterion seem trivial, you’re mistaken- they’re all quite difficult to achieve on their own, let alone together.

What some may not realize is that WPtouch is truly unlike most other plugins out there- we’re re-performing some of the same functions that WordPress itself utilizes to pull heavy weight and do all that WPtouch does. With other plugins there may only be a few hundred lines of code, while with WPtouch you’ve got thousands including the admin files and all the theme files.

So its taken us quite some time to determine the best approach to handling Themes, and we think we’ve found it with the invention of a theme creation method we’re calling CoreTheme.

CoreTheme

The WPtouch CoreTheme is based on the working combination of a Theme folder (in this case, the Default one) and the Core folder.

The Core folder contains only files automatically imported into your active theme, and contains all the features and capabilities of WPtouch separated from the editable theme structure & content of your theme.

A Theme folder contains all the modifiable elements of a theme, without breaking the Core features and functions. It also contains information required to be shown and selected in the WordPress WPtouch admin panel. This information is read from the theme’s readme.txt file. A theme folder can also contain a screenshot.png image to be shown in WordPress WPtouch admin panel, helping users choose and select a preferred theme easily.

Together, the Core and the Theme folders make up a theme.

Minimum Theme Requirements

A Custom WPtouch Theme must have the following files in order to work:

• - header.php
• - index.php
• - footer.php
• - style.css
• - readme.txt
• - screenshot.png

Skeleton Theme

You can create a new theme by simply copying the ‘default’ theme and re-naming it, then begin modifying it to build a custom theme.

We’ve also included a ’skeleton’ theme which is stripped down and contains very little customization, just the minimum + the dependencies on CoreTheme so you can build it up however you like. This is by far the easiest path to a custom theme which bears all the markings of a design you want.

Creating A Custom Core

Just because WPtouch ships with a ready-made Core doesn’t mean you can’t make your own.

To customize the Core files, simply copy a file or files from the Core folder into your Theme folder, and start editing.

WPtouch always looks for the Core files in your Theme folder first, and if it doesn’t find it, defaults to the Core folder and uses its files instead.

This way you can still use some default Core elements, while modifying others. The choice is up to you.

There’s no limit here- you can customize an entire Core for yourself, keeping in mind that features that are missing in your Core that exist in WPtouch’s Core will cause the corresponding admin options to become neutered.

Timeline

We hope to have WPtouch 2.0 available by the time WordCamp SanFrancisco rolls around, but you can’t hold us to that. We’re a busy company with lots of client work on our plates too, so we’ll see what happens.

Public Beta

We’ll have public betas available for download of both WPtouch 1.9 and WPtouch 2.0, and we’ll post about them when they’re released. To find out the super-secret plans on these betas you can follow us on Twitter, or keep checking your WPtouch admin panel and watch our WPtouch news and updates list for posts on the subject.

Down The Road

Beyond WPtouch 2.0 we’d like to be able to offer the ability to take Themes even further, and offer the ability to serve different themes and subsets of themes to different devices and classes of devices. I’d love to see the ability to serve a theme for iPhone/iPod users, BlackBerry users, and less capable devices, all at the same time from within the admin.

Additionally there are other requests we’ll be looking to include, most of which are suggested by our users in our Support Forums. If you haven’t visited yet, stop by and you’ll find bug reports, fixes, suggestions, and helpful tips and tricks.

What’s GPL?

From the GPL preamble:

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors.

You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

Now, when I speak of others’ modifications of WPtouch, I’m not speaking of it in the sense of a derivative work, or something whereby pieces of the code were used to construct something entirely different. What I’m beefing about is the simple removal of the byline in the footer of WPtouch— the line that gives credit to WordPress (the open source publishing platform) and WPtouch.

These kinds of modifications to us are perceived as methods to infer or imply the ownership of the work(s). To me, there’s no way they could not be inferred as such. Some people think that to visibly show you’ve used someone’s else work on your website or blog is a bad thing. We think that’s pure, 100% bullocks, and a very disingenuous approach. If an author of a GPL project has expressly placed a byline, and wishes for it to stay there, the least you can do in using the product is keep it there.

There’s plenty of people who openly and proudly trumpet using Web 2.0 tools on their sites, and for good reason- it allows others who may be interested in using something similar to find out more by clicking a byline link.

In our case we don’t sell these plugins, they’re (and always will be) free to all and licensed under GPL. What we sell is ourselves; we sell (by proxy the plugins and their craftsmanship) our web design and development skills.

In visiting our site people have the opportunity to review this and if interested, consider us for a web project they may have in mind. WPtouch (and every other plugin we’ve ever made) were however never created with this intention— it’s simply that Duane came up with a few of the plugins, we’ve worked together on a few plugins, and BraveNewCode was borne out of our relationship.

I think it’s important to note that there are many ways in which the ‘free’ moniker which has cloaked almost everything related to the internet (from file sharing to the models which newspapers have resorted to). It’s an epic tale all unto itself, but the perception that everything on the web should be inherently free really stems from the adhoc, hacker & grassroots origins, qualities & makeup of the World Wide Web.

It’s in this genealogy that we can understand how many view the internet almost as a virtual garage sale where the price tags read $0 and everyone’s free to mix and match, barter and re-engineer. But there’s a great deal of hypocrisy instead, with many sites and blogs grabbing items at the garage sale, but using them in their own bake sales, turning profits.

One such site is using WPtouch to sell iPhone-related jailbroken apps. Another is using WPtouch as a means to collect people for a mobile-based conference. There’s probably hundreds of scenarios where our work is being using in conjuction with a commerical aim, and we don’t take exception to this directly, but rather that it’s being done without any mention or credit to us. The trouble with free in this case is that its inferred to mean “free to be mine” by those with the inclinations to perceive it this way.

The worst part of course is that we’ve worked tirelessly to improve and expand upon our offerings for everyone, and ask very little in return: credit for what we gave.  All of this said, the vast majority of users have overwhelmingly been incredibly supportive, and hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts and reviews with credit and praise have been written— more than making up for the bad apples in the bunch.

In closing, if you’re not sure about whether or not you can remove bylines or other credit to a creator of a work, simply mail them and ask. In some cases you’ll find some might ask for a donation to do so, some may be fine with it, and others make decisions on a case by case scenario. In general, as a rule, if there’s a byline or other credit visibly displayed within a work it’s there for a reason, and the very little you can do in using the free work is keep it there.