Since WordPress 3.1 was released reports started trickling in of a few things that appeared broken in WPtouch 1.9.x. Because we had a few releases scheduled for around the same time 3.1 was released it was difficult at first to determine the reasons for the bugs, whether they were indeed just WPtouch, or 3.1′s doing.
As it turns out, it’s a bit of both.
There’s a post here describing the nature of the category exclusion bug plaguing queries in 3.1. This has been fixed and in the next release the fix will solve problems for those who have not been up to date on WPtouch’s releases (currently 1.9.24 as of this post).
Though there’s a genuine bug in 3.1 and category exclusion, the method we were using to exclude categories in WPtouch was a little antiquated and backwards.
We’ve since cleaned things up and are using much better (and still backwards compatible) code to exclude categories, and while we did that we also added a few more aspects to the exclusion routine that improve and extend it.
Now, category exclusion will truly exclude that category everywhere. Searches, archive results, and of course the category drop-down list all respect the excluded categories defined in WPtouch.
Exclude by Tag
In the process, we’ve added the same control and power to exclude by tag, and you can even combine the two and WPouch will take care of it, without affecting whatever you’re doing on your desktop theme.
Other Bugs
We also cleaned up some more code and went through debug logs to make sure WPtouch runs error, warning, and php notice free on your server.
Coming Up
The next release (1.9.25) will be available soon and lays the troubles to rest, along with adding new filters to make sure WPtouch doesn’t load on the Samsung Galaxy Tab or Motorola Xoom tablets.