WPtouch 2.0 Pro beta1 is now officially in the wild. The number of beta testers for beta1 is relatively small, so if you applied and didn’t get accepted, don’t worry too much as we’ll be adding more people for beta2.

WPtouch 2.0 Pro represents nearly five months of work between the two of us. The original features were hashed out over a few beers down in Punta Cana of November of last year. It became evident based on our initial discussions that in order to have the features we wanted we would need to do a 100% rewrite of the existing code, which is ultimately what we did.

Baby’s Got a Brand New Bag

2.0 is a complete mobile theming framework that was built upon a comprehensive plugin framework, both of which were created from scratch explicitly for this project. Under the hood WPtouch 2.0 constructs the entire administration panel programmatically, which means adding new features going forward will in most cases not require more than a few lines of code. It also means that mobile theme developers can easily add setting options to the WPtouch administration panel and have the majority of hard work taken care of for them.

Easily Extensible

One of the complaints developers had about WPtouch 1.x is that it wasn’t very easy to build upon. First, we didn’t have many plugin hooks that other plugin developers could tap into. Second, the default theme in WPtouch was fairly inflexible for people trying to add new theme features. We’ve addressed both of these limitations in 2.0.

All WPtouch 2.0 themes are based upon a theming example called Skeleton. It is our goal to continue to update Skeleton for each release, including support for nearly all of the WPtouch 2.x features. Skeleton can easily be cloned in the WPtouch 2.0 administration panel and used as a starting point for a completely custom theme, one that won’t be overwritten when WPtouch is upgraded.

WPtouch 2.0 also includes nearly 100 different hooks and actions that other plugin developers can tap into. In fact, many of the recent features added to WPtouch 2.0 utilized these same hooks.

The World’s Not So Big After All

All the text strings in WPtouch 2.0 have been properly internationalized. That will allow us to slowly translate WPtouch 2.0 into other languages. The first release of WPtouch 2.0 will have support for Italian, Japanese, Spanish, German and French. We’ll hopefully add a new language or two for each subsequent release.

The Beta Cycle

As WPtouch 2.0 is a 100% rewrite, we’re looking to our beta users to help us flesh out any of the issues that crop up in the wild. Beta1 will focus mainly on the administrational panel, the upgrade process, support forum integration, and general WPtouch 2.0 usage. We expect beta1 to last roughly a week or so, depending on any issues that turn up. We’ll be releasing periodic updates to beta1 to fix bugs.

Beta2 will be the second and last beta cycle, and will include the full suite of mobile themes and final functionality. Once we’re confident that beta2 is stable, we’ll release WPtouch 2.0 officially for everyone. So if you do the math, we’re only a few weeks from releasing WPtouch 2.0 for the general public.

Feature Set

There are over 100 new features not present in WPtouch 1.9. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Deep integration between WPtouch and the BraveNewCode support forums – users can post support questions directly from the WPtouch 2.0 administration panel
• Re-designed administrational panel featuring intuitive tab interface
• Admob and adsense advertising support in themes
• Support for multiple Prowl accounts
• New plugin compatibility disabler (prevent problematic plugins from hooking into WPtouch)
• New page/menu management panel that includes drag and drop functionality for icons
• All new theme designs and effects
• Inclusion of Skeleton theming example for developers looking to create custom mobile themes
• Ability to customize a welcome message for 1st-time visitors
• Inclusion of several new icons sets
• New nested menu system available to themes
• Inline comment replies and threading
• Support for web-application mode
• Ships with 5 professionally translated languages

And So It Begins

We want to thank everyone who applied to be a part of our beta program, and also everyone who was officially chosen to help with beta1. We’re very close to releasing WPtouch 2.0 Pro to everyone, something that we are quite looking forward to.

If you’re late to the party, you can sign up to be notified when WPtouch 2.0 Pro is released over at wptouch.com, or follow our updates on Twitter. We’ll post again when the second beta cycle opens up, at which point we can hopefully relay information about the final release date and price points for WPtouch 2.0 Pro.

We’ve just relaunched our website, and we think it sets the stage for the things we have planned for 2010. In this post we explore some of those things, which will hopefully answer the many e-mail, Twitter, and blog comment questions we’ve had in the last 6 weeks or so.

WPtouch 2.0

We’ve posted here a few times in the past about the release of WPtouch 2.0, and each time we’ve done so we anticipated it being released far sooner. The reason for its delays are many, but the good news is that it’s actively being worked on now.

Re-Write

We’re undertaking a complete re-write for 2.0, a necessary step to set the stage for multi-Theme support and some of the other features we have planned. We’ve learned much about the right way to build a WordPress plugin over the past few years, and want to start fresh to make sure that 2.0 is a model example of efficiency and poetry in code and thoughtful care in design.

Around The Corner

With the impending release of an Apple touch tablet (and many other touch tablets) and new updates to touch mobile phone software (Android 2.1 and iPhone 4.0) we’re hoping these new products and features enable us to do more with WPtouch. Rest assured that new capabilities will be added as things develop.

Support Forums

The goal in tearing apart the forums was also for a variety of reasons, but the most important being that we’re moving towards having a single account which you can use to post in the forums and on this site, and in the future any other BraveNewCode related services, sites, etc.

Secondly, the entire design for the Support Forums is being updated to reflect the new website, and until we settled on the website’s overall look, features and layout we couldn’t move too much on the Forums.

Expect them to be up and live again within the coming weeks.

WordTwit, Integrity

We’ll also be hard at work on improving WordTwit, our popular Twitter plugin for WordPress, and developing Integrity, our WordPress security plugin. Due to some of the recent work by the WordPress team it remains to be seen whether a plugin like Integrity is really needed, so we’ll be watching that development.

Shhhhhh Secrets!

Many of the things we’re planning require a little secrecy. As such we’ll post on the website when we’re ready to reveal juicy details, but you’re best served following us on Twitter to get first dibs on news, beta releases, and more goodies.

Today we’re excited that Apple has officially released OS 3.1 for iPhone  & iPod touch, bringing a few new features and several bug fixes.

WPtouch 1.9.3 was also released, and brings with it a new feature and several bug fixes as well.

In 1.9.3 you can now choose to disable Ajax comments as the default method for commenting. We think Ajax comments are great (especially on a mobile device), but they bring with them some issues, and don’t always work right on every install or with every other plugin, so we’ve added this feature as a failsafe for those who’ve been reporting issues.

Other bugs were fixed pertaining to stability and javascript, the admin, and more.

We wanted to get some of the lingering issues resolved before completing and releasing the Skins features, as well as languages support, both of which we feel we’re in the clear to add so look for those to come over the next little while.

As always you can leave feedback about any of our free, open-source WordPress plugins in our Support Forums.