This is a general notice to all visitors who currently do not have a License for our WPtouch Pro, WordTwit Pro or Piggy products.

As of September 1st, 2011 The Community Forums on our Support site are being discontinued in favour of community support for our free products through the WordPress.org support forums.

All Community Forums will be removed and become inaccessible via bravenewcode.com/support.

You will still be able to access community support for our free products via WordPress’ forums.

Customers with Licenses for any of our premium plugins will not be affected by this change.

WordPress 3.2 has two changes that may affect some users: the minimum PHP and MySQL versions required will be PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. That means PHP 4 will no longer be supported by WordPress itself.

As a plugin developer, PHP 4 definitely makes life more complicated. Plugins end up becoming bloated when you need to have separate code for both PHP 4 and PHP 5. Removing the dependency on PHP 4 allows WordPress to remove old code and help streamline the entire codebase.

What does that mean for the users of our products?

Both WPtouch Pro and Piggy currently work with later versions of PHP 4 currently. Some time after WordPress 3.2 comes out, we will deprecate support for PHP 4.

Internally our policy has always been to try (when possible) to support the last two major versions, so when 3.2 comes out we’ll be supporting it and 3.1. But as development proceeds on the next version of WordPress, we’ll remove the PHP 4 aspects from our code and start using PHP 5 exclusively. That allows the code to be smaller, newer (usually more efficient) and we can use PHP 5 functions only, which in general results in a faster development cycle.

WordTwit Pro, which has just been released requires PHP 5 already.

So if you’re a WordPress user you should start looking at what your host provides in PHP support to make sure you’re ready when 3.2 is released. On many hosts switching to PHP 5 is as simple as clicking a button in the hosting control panel, and on others you can usually add a small snippet to your .htaccess file. Unfortunately there are still some hosts that do not provide PHP 5 at all, and for those you will probably have to find an alternate host, or explain to them why they should add support immediately to allow their customers to upgrade their WordPress installations.

WPtouch Plugin Update

WPtouch 1.9.23 has been released, and it includes an important security update, 1 new feature and some fixes.
Here’s the changelog:

• Fixed: IMPORTANT security issue with AJAX icon upload
• Fixed: Issue with excluded categories not working
• Added: Ability to exclude tags by ID from blog (experimental)
• Added: Now filter the excluded categories and tags from the header listings
• Changed: Now removing the admin bar when logged in and looking at WPtouch (will still show for regular theme)

*Translators: please re-submit translations with updated strings (esp. for excluded tags area).

Earth Hour Plugin Update

Earth Hour 1.5 has also been released, it includes:

• New option to disable the banner bar
• Reduces the server check we do from every hour to once per day

Today we released the 1.4 update for our free Earth Hour plugin for WordPress.

This plugin that allows you to show support for the Earth Hour event and “turn off” your website’s lights during the hour. It’s an easy way to show your support for Earth Hour, and raise awareness of the worldwide event.

Before the event your site will show a thin banner which counts down to the event, shows how many other sites are using the plugin, and also links to the official Earth Hour website.

During the event, your website shows a “blackout” screen, with an earth hour logo (or you can display your own) and your own personalized message and earth hour image letting visitors know your website is participating in the event.

You can find out more about the plugin on the Official WordPress plugin repository, or add the plugin through your WordPress admin by visiting the plugins/add new page, and searching for “Earth Hour”.

WWF.ca Website

Recently we were contacted by a friendly employee at the WWF.ca website letting us know they’ve added our Earth Hour plugin to thier Spread The Word page. On the page you’ll find lots of cool banners, images, flash files and more to post on your website or social networking profile page(s).

The Hour Draws Near!

With just over 3 weeks to the Hour remaining, we’ve noticed almost 500 websites participating in the event using our plugin.

To find our more about our free and easy Earth Hour plugin visit the plugin page now.