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 $29 (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 $59 (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 $29
• The price for a 5-pack of licenses is only $59
• 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.