Today we’re excited to be at WordCamp: Developers in Vancouver, Canada. There are some great speakers at the event, which has drawn attendees from all around the world.

How We’re Involved

We’ve been involved with organizing WordCamps in past years (WordCamp Vancouver & WordCamp Whistler), but this time we pitched in by sponsoring the event along with other great sponsors.

If You Missed It

If you missed the conference, be sure to check out the WordCamp: Developers website in the next week or so— all the sessions from both the UX and Development tracks will be posted online, for free.

Coffee & Code

After several months, thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of minutes, we’re close enough to WPtouch 2.0 Pro to announce pricing.

Premium Community

Truth be told it’s actually been difficult for us to make the decision to throw weight behind a premium version of WPtouch. We have always loved the spirit of the open-source community, and agree with the software freedoms associated with works attributed under a GPL license. And we’ve also been behind freely available plugins for our favourite publishing platform. Yet for those with successful and popular WordPress plugins, the support, update, maintenance and upkeep for such a plugin become hefty. Without financial support, they are impossible to sustain effectively, and enjoyably.

There’s a growing community of premium solutions available for platforms like WordPress, and with WPtouch Pro we’re throwing our hat into the ring.

Unlike many other paid plugins, WPtouch Pro is neither small or limited in its functionality, nor is it a premium plugin that’s come out of nowhere— people who purchase WPtouch 2.0 Pro know the quality, time, dedication and style of the work we do, based on the freely available WPtouch 1.x that’s been out for almost 3 years, and our other popular WordPress plugin, WordTwit.

Without Further Ado: Pricing

All figures in Canadian dollars (CAD).

• The price for a single license of WPtouch 2.0 Pro is only $49
• The price for a 5-pack of licenses is only $99
• The price for an unlimited, developer license is only $199

Licenses, among other things offer:
- Free automatic upgrades through a major version (all 2.x releases)
- Pro Support on bravenewcode.com/support
- Access to Docs, Knowledge Base articles
- Receive the new themes that ship with 2.x as a part of automatic updates

Note: Free direct support for WPtouch 1.9 is being discontinued. Free support will end 30 days after the release of 2.0. The Support forums will still include the community forums for 1.9 so users can share tips, and find existing answers to commonly asked questions.

Compare

Compare WPtouch Pro pricing with most other premium plugins and we think you’ll find it quite reasonable (it’s probably one of the cheapest premium plugins, really).

And for all of what WPtouch 2.0 Pro brings to the table we think it’s an incredible offer as far as premium plugins go.

Beta 2

We’ve been making good progress with beta 1 of WPtouch Pro, and plan on pushing out beta 2 early next week, likely Monday. For those in the beta program, expect a 1.4 update tomorrow which should shore up the existing issues in beta 1, and we’ll be working aggressively over the weekend to add a few more things for beta 2.

Beta 2 is an important milestone because it will mark the finished Skeleton template, complete with web-app mode, enabling those of you most interested in custom theming to get to work with what will essentially be the shipping version of the Skeleton.

More Info

You can get more information on WPtouch Pro, what’s included, feature set overviews and sign-up to be notified when its available by visiting bravenewcode.com/wptouch-pro.

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!

As we approach 300,000 downloads of WPtouch and nearly half a million if you count up our other plugins, we’ve been reflecting on what we’ve accomplished and where we’d like to go from here.

Our plugins are freely available and GPL, which means that donations are the only source of income they generate at this time. So our main source of revenue is working with some terrific clients building websites, and doing various development and graphic design for 3rd party services and products.

Over the past year and half that we’ve been running we’ve poured thousands of hours into our client work, and hundreds into our plugins. More recently we’ve had very little time to improve upon our GPL offerings, though.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that at times it seems that people think they’re entitled to the work we produce and improvements upon it. Though it is very much the minority of what we experience from our users, it’s something that can easily take the wind out of our sails— having someone acting as if a bug in your free software is a serious problem that you must resolve or they’ll axe you.

As tough as it is, we’ve realized that our experience with free software only serves to embolden the reality of the expectations we have regarding the future and the real liklihood that we’ll release some pretty cool products or services that will be revenue generating— and which will indeed be supported and will be improved upon over time.

The Ever-So Cool Pipeline

With all of that said we’re excited to soon promote and discuss the future of BraveNewCode and what we have coming down the pipes. Our focus remains with WordPress, but we’re looking at ways we can both expand upon our existing plugins, add new and powerful ones, and build an eco-system of BraveNewCode products and services which will enhance not only WordPress but the way people use the internet, period.

It’s an exciting time, and there’s nothing but hard work ahead for us.

Fade To Black

We’re taking off on a company hiatus/strategy planning vacation in late November, and at that time we’ll be phasing the next steps for what we’re trying to accomplish. For the most part there will be a code-freeze on what we’ve done to date, but rest assured that WordTwit, WPtouch and our other forthcoming plugins like Integrity are going to get the love and attention they deserve.

Look for some exciting changes to take place in the coming weeks/months ahead from us. If you want to stay on top of the pulse follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter— in both places we share secrets you won’t get here : )

We’re still adding a couple finishing touches to it, but WPtouch 1.8.7 is almost ready to go. If you’d like to see some of the changes you can visit bravenewcode.com on your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.

Thanks to everyone who’s visited the BraveNewCode Support Forums and either posted about a plugin issue or helped someone else who did- this is the kind of community we know exists around our plugins, and the kind of community we want to support. We browse the forums every couple days, and try to respond in a timely manner- but like everyone, we’re busy cats and sometimes it might take a little while before we get back to you, so please be patient if we haven’t responded to you yet.

The release is imminent, and should be out tonight or tomorrow at the latest. As always you can upgrade through the WordPress admin if you’re running a current version of WordPress, or download and install the update via FTP otherwise. In either case, your settings & custom icons will remain the same.

Here’s a rundown of what’s been added/changed so far:

• Changed calendar icons from images to CSS-based only (they look sexay!)
• Refined styling of header logo, text shadow, general appearance
• Removed unneeded declarations from the WPtouch stylesheet
• Tested and works efficiently with WordPress MU when installed site-wide (Finally!)
• Please read the details in this readme regarding use on WordPress MU
• Disqus commenting plugins out-of-the-box styling enhancements
• We’re working on IntenseDebate plugin support, should be out with the next revision
• Added javascript to support framesets and screen size detection