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.

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 : )

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

We encourage everyone to head on over to the support forums and look around. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know. And on that note, we’re off to Cancun!

What Does It Do?

The Earth Hour plugin will add a small fixed banner across the top of your site (we’re running it here on BraveNewCode) that provides a link to the Earth Hour website, counts all the sites using the plugin and participating in the event, and also provides a link for others to visit our site and learn about/download the plugin themselves for their own WordPress sites.

It will also automatically determine your timezone for Earth Hour, Saturday March 28th at 8:30pm local time, and ‘switch off’ your website, instead showing a page showing your solidarity of support for the hour, and then ‘switch on’ your site afterwards.

You can view screenshots on the earth hour plugin page, along with version details and the reasons behind our creating the plugin.

The plugin is free to all, released under the GPU General Public License.

What’s New In Design

We’ve softened up the design and also made the layout a little thinner- some who visited on 1024×768 desktops will likely enjoy the change, as the site won’t seem so disproportionately large to them. We’ve polished, refined & changed the fonts in a few places, and overall have reduced their sizes for proportionality’s sake.

Those viewing the site in Mozilla-based (Camino, Firefox) and Webkit-based (Safari, Shiira) will notice some additional features and qualities in the design. As a general rule we support the very highest in web standards and new functionalities in browsers, so we’ve opted for more work with things like rounded corners using CSS not images, and when Internet Explorer gets its act together (read catches up to where everyone else is at) we’ll add its advanced support as well.

What’s New In Development

Duane has added an incredible functional and unique Portfolio package together, which takes advantage of custom Ajax & jQuery javascript to accomplish the heavy lifting.

One neat thing about it is that from any individual portfolio client’s page (Jessie farrell, for example) you can browse the whole portfolio, just as you can on the landing page itself. This is also a good thing for Search Engine Optimization reasons, and something we routinely make sure we consider and include where needed for our client projects.

WPtouch 1.8: Coming Soon

We’ve also been hard at work on WPtouch 1.8, the next update to our popular WordPress mobile plugin. The update will offer a couple significant new features, along with solving some bugs that cropped up in the 1.7.x series. Look for it out in the next couple days.

If you’ve downloaded 1.7-1.7.4, please update to 1.7.5 to fix the issues identified post-release.

First of all, a big thanks to everyone who posted in the comments, left us tweets and mailed in to report on the state of WPtouch 1.6 and the kinds of bugs they experienced & features they’d like to see— your feedback is invaluable to us.

We’re driving hard toward the big 2.0 release, which will see some remarkable changes, including (finally) localization for international users and themes. WPtouch 2.0 will ship with 3 default themes to choose from, to further customize your site’s appearance on the iPhone, iPod touch, Android and soon, Blackberry Storm.

We’ll also be adding a small documentation guide for aspiring designers and developers to work on their own WPtouch themes, which we’ll index and provide for download for free on the website. To stimulate some growth here, we’ll be having a contest with some good prizes for those who create some stellar themes. It’ll be a great time for WPtouch users the world over.

WPtouch 1.7.5

We considered issuing a small maintenance release to fix a couple of missed bugs with 1.6, but instead decided to hold off as they weren’t widespread and turn our focus to continuing to add features alongside solving pesky issues.

Below is the complete changelog for 1.7.5:

• Added option to do GZIP compression
• Added ability to choose if WPtouch or regular version of your site is shown first
• Fixed WP login/out button bugs
• Added login/out auto-detect for WP 2.7 or pre-WP 2.7 sites
• Fixed loading path issue that caused drop-down menu button to fail
• Added choice between alphabetical or page order sorting of the drop down menu
• Added clock icon
• Minor admin fixes & changes (+ better Mozilla browser support)
• Fixes for categories drop-down menu (now shows post #’s)
• Automatic detection & support for Peter’s anti-spam plugin
• Built-in support for Adsense in posts
• Moved Stats tracking box beside Advertising Options
• Better WordPress version support detection
• More refined image auto-sizing with WP added images & galleries in posts / pages
• Fix for WordPress shortcodes appearing in excerpts
• Changed how WPtouch shows switch links
• Auto-adjusting width/height for MobileSafari plugin objects (YouTube, Quicktime)
• 1.7.1: Fixed re-direct bug when viewing default theme from mobile device
• 1.7.2: Fixed missing Android support
• 1.7.3: Fixed broken login link on some installations
• 1.7.4: Fixed a warning that occurred when multiple gzip handlers were enabled

Download

Feel free to head on over to the WPtouch page to download the new version, or use the auto-update mechanism in your WordPress admin to install it. As always, we love to hear feedback from our users, and will continue to add new features and functionality going forward.

What’s Next?

We’re working on better Android support, built-in tie-in with WordTwit & twitter, localization, themes & more. Stay tuned.

We would have offered it at a small fee, and that fee would have meant lifetime upgrades for anyone who purchased it.

But over the past month we’ve been in talks with others about the idea, and have decided that we’d prefer it to remain open source and above all free to everyone.

We will of course accept and hope for donations- you’d be surprised how much a small donation helps encourage us to keep actively working on the project.

We still have big plans for WPtouch, including localization, themes, AdSense support and wider plugin compatibilty.

We’ve been busy with client projects the last little while so we don’t have any news as of yet when the 2.0 version will be released. As we get closer to launch we’ll likely have a beta we’ll need tested, so if you’re interested in either working with us on themes or localization, please drop us a line.

We’ll continue in the mean time to improve the 1.x branch of WPtouch, with the menu issues addressed in the previous post our top priority.

We’ve really overhauled the guts and trimmed, sliced, and optimized everywhere to squeak out some very impressive speed enhancements while also adding features. The package gets smaller but the features keep growing— it’s a challenge we enjoy.

This update packs a lot of punch! Below is a run down of what we’ve added/changed from 1.2.1:

• Switch from Prototype to the more WordPress-native jQuery for javascript (much faster!)
• Fix for wrong re-directs happening unintentionally if you use a static home page
• Elimination of unneeded images, javascript (shaving more than 100KB!)
• More template file cleanups, image & code optimizations
• The addition of more comments in code templates to help you make custom modifications
• Option to enable comments on pages
• Option to manually enter in a new blog title (fixes cases where the blog title runs the length of the header and wraps)
• Option to hide/show excerpts by default on the home, search, and archive pages
• Switch code links are automatically injected into your regular theme’s footer now, and is only seen on the iPhone/ipod touch
• In all, despite the addition of new features we’ve cut load times for WPtouch in half with this release over 1.2.x releases!

The last point is a rather impressive one. In our tests, we’ve found the current version to be up to 2X faster in load time over the previous versions, most notably over 3G and EDGE. These test were done with all features enabled for WPtouch. We’ll be posting more detail on that in the coming days, but we’re pretty sure you’ll notice the difference yourselves. Our testing conditions spanned WIFI, 3G & EDGE with full bars on each and no other phone activity going on to affect bandwidth. We used duanestorey.com to do the testing.

Important!

In this version we’re automatically injecting the switch code into your regular theme’s template. This means that if you have manually placed the code in your template previously, you’ll have a duplicate pair of links. Please remove the manually added one, it’s no longer needed.

Remember to backup any custom files you have modified or added to WPtouch before upgrading. The 2.0 release will both include localization and a configuration which will avoid this upgrade issue entirely. We’re on track for a september release for WPtouch 2.0.

There will be a few official themes to choose from when we launch, all of which will take advantage of the same settings and features of the original theme. But you don’t have to rely on just our theme releases, because we’ve built support for the ability to create your own custom themes and select them as well.

Developers?

So of course, if you’ve already modified WPtouch to your own liking, we want to hear about it. Get in touch with us and if we like what you’ve done, we’ll set you up to convert your theme to be WPtouch 2.0 compatible. In exchange for your hard work we’ll provide you with a free copy of WPtouch 2.0 when it’s released with free upgrades for life as well.

It’s really simple to create your own theme: copy the default folder to the /custom folder in the wptouch directory, and start editing! We commented lots in the template files to help guide you as to what’s editable and what’s not if you want to maintain the customization features and admin options. When you’re done, simply change the information inside the theme_info.txt file (theme description, author, URL) and it’ll be reflected in the WPtouch admin as a custom theme now selectable.

As we move along we’ll host the custom themes on the site for people to browse and download.

Don’t Overwrite Me!

We’ve also changed things around so that your custom themes and icons won’t get overwritten when you upgrade WPtouch. WPtouch will only overwrite itself and the official themes and icons, leaving your changes intact.

We’ll release more details and some screenshots & screencasts in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned.

Style Is Everything

While we recognize that many of you are content with the original “iPhone-application-like” design that WPtouch employs, we also recognize the opportunity to foster some really unique implementations by supporting and encouraging themes. We look forward to seeing what everyone can come up with!

The possibilities for WordPress as a bonafide CMS are always growing, and plugins like WPLite only enhance that possibility. With WPLite you can remove unnecessary aspects of the WordPress back-end from the eyes of your clients, helping them focus on and learn the pertinent aspects of the WordPress publishing platform easily and effectively. The WPLite admin page let’s you select/deselect checkboxes for almost every single WordPress feature/page/option.

For first-time WordPress client users, this plugin will become essential to ensuring they feel comfortable with diving in and managing content for themselves.

The work itself was rather standard, but the highlight for me was being able to convert the site from its flash roots to WordPress in only a few days, including full cross-browser compatibility testing and the addition of a few new site features. It goes to show that we’ve got our work process down, and can come through for clients with limited timelines and deliver the intended content.

We’re proud to have been involved with the team at Urban Project, and wholeheartedly wish to extend our best to them in their efforts going forward.