Recently Google began the GoMo initiative, an online campaign to increase awareness of the importance of having a mobile-specific version of your website for your visitors.

WHAT IS A MOBILE SITE AND WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?
Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn’t mean it’s mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions.

The GoMo website includes useful information and powerful statistics to show you why going mobile should be an important part of your online business plan & future.

It will also allow you to test your website, and will give you a ranking of 1-4 in terms of the quality of the mobile experience you’re offering visitors.

Lastly it provides a small, non-WordPress list of vendors that assist in building mobile sites. We’re not yet listed, but that will likely change, and folks like us will be included.

Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Sites

Google also recently announced that mobile site optimization now affects your AdWords Quality Score. This means that serving ads to mobile visitors with a mobile-optimized website will earn you a higher rank.

The AdWords system will automatically visit your landing page, and evaluate your site as viewed by smartphones. However, if you already have a mobile site, we recommend confirming with your webmaster that you’ve configured your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.

So in both cases, WPtouch & WPtouch Pro powered WordPress websites score perfect and will help you both with your business presence online in an increasingly mobile ‘webscape’, while also improving your Adwords quality & revenue.

We wanted to write a follow-up to this article as many followers on Twitter found the post by Jakob and asked us about it, plus— we’re big fans of Jakob, too!

First off, it has to be stated that it seems Jakob didn’t know that this is a free plugin for WordPress, and was mostly in its basic, default settings. As a result, his review is skewed towards thinking allkpop.com made all the decisions in the design appearance for the mobile version.

WPtouch’s default settings are mostly aimed at exposing its most commonly used features, making it simpler for a user to setup (or in some cases, they don’t even have to set anything up, you just activate it and go!).

While Jakob had some great things to say about WPtouch, he recommeded a few design changes which, unbeknownst to him are either configurable options in the WPtouch plugin, or options in our newer WPtouch Pro plugin.

The site he reviewed is allkpop.com, a celebrity news and gossip site.

Here’s the site he saw:

And here’s his re-desgined version:

We’ll respond to his list of design changes one by one here:

1. Fewer features, which we achieved by removing three elements:
bylines, because they aren’t needed to choose an article (which is the only point of listing headlines on the front page); selectable categories and tags, which were too small to hit reliably anyway (and categories like “music” seem worthless on a pop site); and the triangle-button that displays a summary in place (instead, we always show a summary).

Bylines, categories and tags are options in the WPtouch settings, and can be turned off easily. The drop-arrow that reveals the excerpt is also a configuration option (excerpts shown) in the admin settings.

2. Bigger touch targets. The entire story tile can now be tapped, and users no longer need the added precision of tapping the headline itself…

We agree that the full tile as a clickable link is a good thing— but hard to implement given our options for this area. We chose instead to add a “read this article” link in addition to being able to tap on a title.

3. Full headlines instead of truncated headlines. This is probably the biggest redesign…

Full headlines or truncated headlines is also an option in the WPtouch settings.

4. Enhanced scannability by highlighting each pop star’s name in the headlines.

This we can’t really do anything about, nor WordPress itself without some custom hacking around.

5. Even more information scent by showing a short story summary (a “deck”) under each headline.

Let’s be honest, the term “information scent” is kind of creepy, no? (jk, Jakob).

Here Jakob doesn’t know that we are simply creating excerpts automatically from post content, and thus need to truncate. WPtouch will show the custom excerpt set for a post if it’s used.

6. Using pop star photos instead of date icons. Not only does this add some visual interest, it further enhances scannability and information scent as many users will recognize their favorite star’s face faster than they can read a headline.

WPtouch supports using thumbnails instead of the calendar icons as an admin option.

7. Room for 4 full story tiles without scrolling. The slightly tighter spacing lets users view the entire 4th story summary in their first scan of the page. If users do scroll down, the ability to view more tiles in less space also means that they work a bit less for each new story, and so they’re likely to want more of them. Because this second benefit is relatively small, we considered making the tiles smaller to display more stories on the first screen. On balance, the added information scent from the story summaries and pop star photos seemed a better use of the space — but testing an alternative would be worthwhile.

We disagree with this one— it’s a common practice on the web to “cut the fold”, meaning that content is cut-off at the bottom of the viewport to reveal to a user that scrolling will shown more content. If everything is neatly shown above the bottom of the viewport, it might appear that that’s all there is.

Additionally, because WPtouch dynamically truncates excerpts, some tiles are taller vertically than others. We spent a considerable amount of time trying all the variations in the settings to find a happy place where the appearance of a tile was decent no matter what the options were.

8. Showing the publication date only as a divider between stories published on different dates. Because so many stories are published each day, users typically see only the current day’s date when they access the site, unless they scroll down far enough to reach yesterday’s news. Thus, the story date is not worth the substantial screen real estate it occupies in the live design. In general, it’s good to question any mobile design that repeats the same information multiple times; such redundancy is probably a poor use of highly limited screen space.

Jakob doesn’t know that when thumbnails are used in WPtouch, the date is shown below the title of the post instead. We did look at designs where we only showed the date as a divider between posts, but it didn’t quite look/work right with the “Load More Entries” feature, so we canned it because it seemed confusing.

9. Adding more space between the navigation bar’s two options so users are less likely to touch the wrong one.

This one makes sense, though we don’t often find that users struggle with the WPtouch header links, we decided in WPtouch Pro to get rid of the thin bar below the header bar altogether in favour of the drop-down menu.

10. Labeling the drop-down menu instead of simply denoting it by a triangle. (It’s just above search in the original design — a subtle presentation that’s mostly overlooked by users.) Depending on which commands are actually in the menu, a different name might be better. We didn’t redesign the entire navigation system, but we assumed that a revised categorization system would be the most valuable and usable way to navigate the site, after headline-tapping and search. (See our seminar on IA structuring for more information on how to determine the best access schemes.)

In WPtouch Pro we moved all links on the thin bar within a menu toggle button which has the text “Menu”, precisely because we agree with this thinking. In all honesty we haven’t gotten around to doing the changes in WPtouch 1.9.x, but plan to.

Not Too Shabby

So there you have it! I think Jakob would be impressed to see most of the things he critiqued are included as options in WPtouch, our free mobile plugin offering for WordPress.

Today we’re happy to announce Piggy™, a new premium WordPress plugin which adds mobile web-app access to your WP E-Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopp or Cart66 sales information.

Piggy puts real-time sales data from WP E-Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopp or Cart66 in your pocket.

iOS and Android

Piggy works and looks great on iOS and Android devices. Its gorgeous, sharp interface also fully supports the iPhone 4′s rich retina display.

Clutter-free, Clean Layout

Simple and elegant, Piggy reveals the sales statistics you care about in its streamlined, easy to use layout.

View sales information for today, this week, this month or year— compare data, average sales and units sold, plus view the top selling products in your shop, and more.

Piggy Predicts The Future

Using complex forecasting, Piggy also makes accurate sales predictions for the day, week, month and year ahead, and provides forecasting for product sales, too.

See how new products added in your store affect your bottom line— gauge how new prices change your outlook— it’s all at your fingertips, in a glance, with Piggy.

Always Fresh

Piggy smartly checks and automatically refreshes when new sales come in, so you always have the most up-to-data at your fingertips.

Push Notifications

And it works with iOS apps like Prowl and Howl to deliver real-time, instant push notifications of new sales to your iOS device. Configure as many devices as you wish to receive these updates.

Knowing your sales numbers is vitally important for your business— with Piggy you can have them in your pocket.

Availability & Compatibility

Piggy works with WP E-Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopp or Cart66.

A support and upgrades license for Piggy costs just $25.00 (CAD).

Piggy™ is on sale now!

When we first wrote the code and designed what would become WPtouch we did so with one clear thing in mind— we were creating something for where the mobile web was going, not where it was or where it had been.

On Every Website

We imagined that nearly every website would eventually offer mobile versions, and that those who didn’t would be the exception.

At first, tools like WPtouch would be useful to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile presentation. As anyone who’s built a website knows, development and design aren’t all that cheap, and if you’re adding a mobile version to it just adds more time, money, and effort to the process. What’s more, there just weren’t any good tools available previously to help do so. Many site owners previously didn’t consider shipping a mobile version for these reasons.

Being able to install and configure a mobile version with little to know development time or cost is a great stop-gap solution for many, and perfectly suitable as a permanent solution for others. WPtouch accomplishes this gracefully.

The Wave

These people venturing into the mobile arena with regular websites are intrepid explorers; the first wave of small and medium-sized website owners adapting to a space that previously could only be occupied by large companies, or those with the cash/business need to deliver mobile web experiences. Now, there are different tools to harness web traffic viewership that make it easier and more affordable to offer “tailored for the mobile web” solutions.

The Wave Redux

At present, a growing number of those explorers in the mobile web publishing world are growing more savvy, and want more custom mobile solutions that better reflect the style and brand that their desktop sites/services offer.

As more and more people join the mobile revolution, postered by similar solutions to mobile web presentation of content like WPtouch, this wave of mobile exploration will grow strong, yet not everyone will follow.

This marks the point of divergence.

Two Schools

With the rise of social networking services which collect information and serve vast amounts of people, together with the “app-ification” of the web ( the tendency for ubiquitous interface styles to serve content), users are increasingly demanding this ubiquity- simple solutions like WPtouch Pro which offer a compromise between customization and ease of use.

The divergence is created not by the explorers, but rather by their users— much of the feedback we see and hear is often from those who are asking website owners to install WPtouch for them to use to access content. The growing want for a familiar, easy interface is a by-product of the increasing complexity experienced by web users on all web and technology fronts.

The High Horsers

Conversely, those that advocate and prefer completely custom mobile solutions are either a) in the web industry and are savvy, preferring to distinguish themselves from others and have the skill to do so, or b) have the resources to afford the cost of such development.

It’s been our experience that the majority of mobile web users prefer something like WPtouch. That may not be true of website owners, but the demand for WPtouch by visitors says something powerful that you just don’t see on the desktop.

Idealism vs. Reality

As a content publisher, it’s ideal to deliver completely custom mobile solutions- similar design experiences on the desktop + mobile web is really (what seems at first pass) the most natural. But the differences between them are vast, like those between the workings of quantum and relative mechanics; with time and examination it becomes clear that completely custom mobile experiences might not be the best solution for a great many sites.

The medium of the internet is heavily influenced by the ways it can be presented. As desktop displays got larger and the tools for web development smarter, the web grew in a way that was directly opposed to the restrictive nature of small mobile devices and the “information without decoration” needs of mobile web users (oh, the dreaded WAP).

Then came the iPhone, and with it an explosion of touch-based smartphones that aimed to put the real web in your pocket.

But the real web in your pocket just didn’t feel right. Native apps showed that web content presented and tailored for the device and touch interface proved far more popular than the websites they were culled from.

That App-Like Experience

That’s why we chose to go the route of separating the presentation of mobile web content in a user interface from its website’s presentation, and instead tailor it to the devices it would be viewed on— at current the iOS and Android devices that make up the bulk of the mobile web traffic today.

These touch devices have interface requirements and interactive interactive prepositions which either do not exist on the desktop or have no corollary. We thought it was more natural that a mobile user, becoming accustomed to the way their mobile device worked and behaved, be presented with a similar interface that they would instantly recognize and understand.

We worked to match expectations for the behavior of how content + navigation were seen & interacted with. The goal for a user being (when presented with a similar layout on another website) that they would focus less on the layout itself but more on its content.

Bold-ly Forward

Some people think WPtouch should also have backwards, non-touch compatibility on devices like the BlackBerry Bold, Curve, etc. While these devices are still popular in many business environments, they don’t represent much of the mobile web traffic today, and the direction these browsing statistics are going. What’s more, the browsers on older, non-touch mobile devices make it quite difficult to offer rich, engaging experiences, dampening the cause to create them.

That’s an important distinction: The popularity of mobile devices themeselves in the wild doesn’t necessarily mean you should invest in web solutions for them; rather, popular mobile devices which account for the bulk of mobile traffic should be your concern.

And in that regard, WPtouch and WPtouch Pro cover well over 90% of that traffic.

Philosophy

So we look forward to what’s next, and instead of working with the mobile web today exclusively, we see the future of the mobile web when we consider what we do with the WPtouch/WPtouch Pro plugins. We’re not prophets and have no crystal ball when it comes to where the mobile revolution might take us all, but we are tuned to the needs of users and content creators, and hope to remain a leader in providing tools for accessing WordPress on the go.

That’s why we believe strongly in WPtouch Pro and the future of the mobile web. A quote from that video that summarizes the future nicely is:

In the next five years more people will connect to the internet via a mobile vs a PC

Based on some statistics I collected prior to my presentation at WordCamp Portland, I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment.

Every once in awhile we like to share an overview of what’s been happening and what we’re up to— affectionately, our “state of the code” address of sorts.

WPtouch 1.9.19

While WPtouch Pro is our main focus, we still give love and attention to WPtouch 1.9, servicing it for bug fixes and feature additions to make it even better.

We just released version 1.9.19, and with it we’ve finally delivered true localization. We’ve included the .pot file in the new /lang folder, which can be used to create language .mo files to translate both the theme and the admin panel.

Submit your translation today to translation@wptouch.com, and we’ll review it for inclusion in a future release.

WPtouch Pro v2.0.9

WPtouch Pro 2.0.9

Notable new additions include better custom language translation handling, improvements in WordPress Multisite compatibility, and a new feature allowing WPtouch Pro to be disabled for selected URLs and pages.

We strongly recommend upgrading if you’re running any previous version of WPtouch Pro.
WPtouch Pro 2.0.9 will be available later today.

Upcoming: WPtouch Pro v2.1

We’ve begun work on the next major version of WPtouch Pro, which will deliver iPad support, child themes, and support for WordPress 3.0′s custom menus.

Many people have inquired as to what iPad support will be in 2.1, and we’d like to share a couple of thoughts about it.

First of all, iPad support will be opt-in. When you update to 2.1 you’ll be able to decide whether you want to enable iPad support or not. Some are happy with the way their sites look and work on iPad already, and for those people they won’t have to do anything.

For those who do want iPad support, they have a number of options related to what happens with iPad support, and we’ll undoubtedly add to those options over time.

There are already some solutions available for iPad theme stuff with WordPress. We could have shipped “support” for iPad very early on, by simply enabling the user agent and letting WPtouch be WPtouch on iPad. We didn’t for several reasons, but the most important is that we don’t think WPtouch as a theme concept is appropriate on a device like iPad.

Small, hand-held mobile devices are very different from tablet devices such as the iPad. And the iPad user interface, (while borrowing from the iPhone) has some dramatic differences, most notably the way in which vertical and horizontal views are handled in most apps.

So we’re hoping our solutions feel as natural, intuitive and enjoyable for users as possible. And because we don’t have to make the same kinds of compromises as we do with WPtouch (for device compatibility), we can do a few things that should enhance the web experience of a site using WPtouch Pro on iPad.

WPtouch Pro Affiliate Program

We recently launched a new Affiliate Program for customers of WPtouch Pro. Earn 20% on purchases of WPtouch Pro made through text or image advertisements on your website. Find out more ->

WordTwit

We’ve received lots of feedback over the past few months on our WordPress Twitter plugin, WordTwit. Ideas on how to make it better, and what people would like to see added to it have trickled in on our Forums, over Twitter, and here on the blog.

Though we haven’t said much publicly, we’ve been listening to everyone and have been working on adding several enhancements and new features to bring WordTwit up to version 3.0 with some powerful new additions. Stay tuned on the progress towards its 3.0 release, we’ll have new details available soon.

Site Revamp

A Sneak Peek At The New Forums

We hope everyone will enjoy the new site when we unveil the new digs. We’ll post some screenshots for feedback a little further down the road.

Thanks

We want to say thanks to all our WPtouch Pro customers, our users, friends, family and followers. It’s your support and interest in what we’re doing that keeps us motivated to do more.

Best,
The BraveNewCode Team

Today we’re proud to announce the immediate availability of the major upgrade to WPtouch, WPtouch 2.0 Pro. WIth over 100 new features, a brand new admin panel and more themes available soon, WPtouch Pro is the best rich-mobile theme solution for WordPress websites.

Competitively priced at an incredible value, WPtouch Pro represents intense dedication over the past 3+ months between Duane Storey and Dale Mugford, co-founders of BraveNewCode.

60,000 lines of code with blood, sweat and love were poured into every aspect of the plugin, making it one of the most comprehensive, powerful, modular and easy-to-use WordPress plugins ever made.

Highlights

With more power and customization than ever before, WPtouch 2.0 Pro provides WordPress website owners a flexible mobile theming tool, while offering visitors a rich, fast and polished mobile web experience.

Web-App Mode

Offer your iPhone and iPod touch users a full-screen, AJAX-powered experience when they bookmark your site to their home screens. A first for WordPress mobile themes, WPtouch 2.0′s Web-App Mode automatically converts all local website links to load inside its fullscreen view, without any additional setup or configuration!

And just like native apps on iPhone and iPod touch, you can create and apply your own branded loading screen image that will display while your site fires up in Web-App Mode… sexy!

You can try out Web-App Mode right here on BraveNewCode.com.

Internationalized

WPtouch Pro comes ready with translations into Italian, German, French, Japanese and Spanish, and new languages like Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian and more will be added over upcoming release updates.

Discussion On The Go

In WPtouch 2.0, the full WordPress commenting system is supported. Paginated comments, inline replies and threading all work simply and beautifully. Your desktop theme comment settings are automatically transformed within WPtouch, with no extra setup required.

Coming soon: Intense Debate and Disqus commenting plugin systems will be supported, too, offering more native commenting WordPress power in a mobile experience than anywhere else.

Now Playing: Your Own Mobile Theme

WPtouch 2.0 offers some great theme experiences out-of-the-box, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Our Development Guru Duane Storey has painstakingly planned out a mobile theming framework underneath that provides flexible, time-saving power for theme creators looking to take WPtouch Pro to the next level.

Leverage the included Skeleton template to customize your theme, or of you’re a developer customer build one from scratch, harnessing the Developer Docs available to build your masterpiece.

All of BraveNewCode’s own WPtouch 2.0 themes are based on the very same Skeleton template included with every copy of WPtouch Pro.

Powerful Administration

The WPtouch Pro admin panel is as polished and pretty as the themes it drives. We’ve re-designed the plugin’s admin panel and packed a slew of new features into it.

From the drag and drop page/icon management to the easy to use theme browser/manager, to the new WPtouchboard overview, the WPtouch Pro admin panel might just be the best ever created for a WordPress plugin.

What You Get

For just $49 (CAD):

• A single-domain upgrade and support license for WPtouch Pro
• Re-download the plugin at any time by logging into bravenewcode.com/support
• As WPtouch Pro is GPL, you can modify, tweak or remix the code how you see fit
• Upgrades through all 2.x releases!
• Automatically receive any new free themes we add that ship with WPtouch 2.x
• Direct, professional support from the BNC team for the plugin (excludes custom theme support)
• Access to Knowledge Base articles, and User Docs
• One helluva cool plugin!

For just $99 (CAD):

• A 5-Pack of domain licenses for upgrades and support with WPtouch Pro
• Re-download the plugin at any time by logging into bravenewcode.com/support
• As WPtouch Pro is GPL, you can modify, tweak or remix the code how you see fit
• Upgrades through all 2.x releases!
• Automatically receive any new free themes we add that ship with WPtouch 2.x
• Direct, professional support from the BNC team for the plugin (excludes custom theme support)
• Access to Knowledge Base articles, and User Docs
• One helluva cool plugin!

For just $199 (CAD):

• Unlimited domain licenses for upgrades and support with WPtouch Pro
• Re-download the plugin at any time by logging into bravenewcode.com/support
• As WPtouch Pro is GPL, you can modify, tweak or remix the code how you see fit
• Upgrades through all 2.x releases!
• Automatically receive any new free themes we add that ship with WPtouch 2.x
• Direct, professional support from the BNC team for the plugin
• Access to Knowledge Base articles, and User Docs
• Access to Developer Docs, function reference, PSD templates, resources
• Custom theme support and guidance
• One helluva cool plugin!

To learn more about these packages or to pick up your own copy of WPtouch Pro, please visit the WPtouch Pro product page.

If you have any product questions, feel free to leave a comment here.
~The BraveNewCode Team

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.

Duane talked shop at WordCamp Portland about opportunities for WordPress and mobile devices, including the history of the mobile internet, the opportunities presented by mobile web users, plugins and themes available to facilitate mobile use of WordPress, how to test your site for mobile use, and more.

Video production by Joe Christensen of Blaze Streaming Media.

It’s not that we didn’t fix the annoying white page bug, that’s fixed. Nor is it any other issue which is causing us delays. It’s simply that the holidays have roped us, and we’ve also got some client commitments which must be completed before we ship out a plugin update (gotta pay the bills, folks). The only remaining task is ensuring that the plugin’s admin interface looks good on both 2.7 and pre-2.7 releases, and we should have that done soon.

Hope everyone is having a good holiday,

~BNC

Combined together, the statistics for WPtouch on WordPress’s website and our own now bring total downloads for the plugin to over 25,000 37,000— a remarkable achievement for such a niche plugin. We hope it speaks both to the quality of our work and the way that you, our users, have become such a valiant community in supporting and encouraging its use and growth. We also know that it speaks to the massive wave of new iPhone & iPod touch mobile users who are ever increasingly taking the web mobile, and because of what we’re doing, taking WordPress with it as well.

There are already and will be in the future many great additions to the plugin to enhance both its life on the platforms it now supports and those it will soon grow towards. We know that the potential for its audience and user-base have opportunities to expand dramatically, and we continue to spend the fragments of our free time that we can devoted to making it a quality plugin, free to all, to enhance the experience of those who visit WordPress based sites on mobile touch devices.

So again, from the BraveNewCode team, thank you.

Though it’s not much for a release, it’s the kind of bug that’s been troublesome for both users and us developers for a little while- we’re glad it’s squashed.

The problematic areas addressed in the 1.3.5 release are:

• WPtouch advanced javascript effects not working
• Drop-Down Menu does not work
• WPtouch fails to show posts, and instead only shows the pinstripes background
• Errors relating to the_time() function call

So if you’ve disabled advanced javascript to solve related issues with the last few releases, you should be safe turning it back on and enjoying the advanced features of WPtouch.

We’ve got more plugin compatibility admin features planned for successive updates as we work towards 2.0. Stay tuned.

So that’s that. Enjoy.

Oh! The upgrade spiel:

We’ve added the jQuery no-conflict setting to all javascript which calls on jQuery in WPtouch, thereby eliminating 99% of the compatibility and script conflict issues users were (unknowingly) facing. These issues were responsible for the top three errors listed above.

Also included in this release are style enhancements to the search dropdown.

SWITCH CODE REMINDER

As of the 1.3 release 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. You can remove the manually added one, it’s no longer needed. If you’d prefer to keep, have a look inside wptouch.php for the commented code which you can change to re-enable the manual switch code.

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.

While much faster and a better platform overall for WPtouch, it is currently causing problems for some users.

The issue lies in having other plugins on our site activated that are loading conflicting scripts. This causes jQuery to fail in loading properly, and renders the effects we use with it inoperable.

At current there is no way to check for others’ scripts, so we as plugin developers are stuck with this issue.

For the time being, please ‘disable advanced javascript’ in the WPtouch admin panel to resolve the issue. We will investigate a solution to fix this problem in an upcoming update.

Thanks for your comments and support, together we’re building a community of development for WPtouch that helps it get better and better!

If you haven’t come across it, but have considered blogging from your iPhone or iPod touch if it weren’t for the slow, bloaty WordPress admin- I just made your day (actually WPhone will, but I digress).

I wrote this post using its slick admin, and its post limitations are really Apple’s devices’ limits (no cut and paste, no image upload).

There seems to be one bug where editing a post means re-typing the title each time, but I may be overlooking something in that regard.

Check it out.

We’ve got some aggressive plans to move WPtouch into unheard-of realms for the WP community, as well as other projects that will tie into it, but be cool all on their own. The one roadmap we can talk about is WPtouch, being that it’s a GPL project.

WHO SAID LOOKS AREN’T EVERYTHING?

WPtouch’s design was meant to mimic an Apple-like application look, and function in similar ways. The easy logic there was that it would be a cool achievement to totally transform a blog/website into looking like an app, and functioning like one where possible. With the use of Ajax in certain places alongside some Scriptaculous effects, I think we archived it for the most part.

But there quickly became the reality that even though we’d built custom, flexible style into the theme, it would be awesome if users were able to come up with their own themes for it, as well (plus we have notions of coming up with more official themes as well).

CAN WE SAY THEMING FOR THE WIN?

Themes made by users, easily selectable in the admin, with the possibility of us hosting them here on the site, in an easily user upload/download way. So that’s what we’ll be working on going forward with WPtouch, as well as a few other tweaks and changes to shore up the 1.0 line.