WPtouch Pro 2.2 Admin Panel Snap

WPtouch Pro 2.2 Now Available

We’re always looking at ways we can improve, optimize and streamline our work, especially for our mobile plugins WPtouch, WPtouch Pro and Piggy. On mobile, every split second counts, and we work hard to improve the speed of our products while maintaining ease of use and clean under-the-hood code.

In the WPtouch Pro 2.2 update (now available) we’ve packed more improvements, fixes, tweaks & refinements than ever before in anything we’ve done. After a solid four weeks of work, every corner of our premium mobile plugin offering was given a good wash and made even better for our customers.

WPtouch Pro 2.2 is a free update for all existing customers.

Highlights

2.2 Web-App Mode Notice Bubble

With WPtouch Pro we revolutionized mobile WordPress plugins bringing our one-of-a-kind Web-App Mode feature to WordPress self-hosted sites everywhere.

With Web-App Mode you can effortlessly offer a fullscreen web application version of you website for visitors on iOS devices, out-of-the-box.

In WPtouch Pro 2.2, the technology unpinning Web-App Mode has been re-written for even better performance and reliability, on both mobile and iPad.

We’ve also improved compatibility with other WordPress plugins that require AJAX like Google Translate. For these plugins, a single click disables WPtouch Pro’s AJAX in web-app mode to ensure compatibility. WPtouch Pro then intelligently uses a new method for loading your site pages without AJAX, all while maintaining a smooth, fast mobile web application experience.

Squish!

We also took the time needed to eliminate a variety of smaller issues that crept up after the 2.1 release. In total, we’ve fixed dozens of issues found by team staff and customers, totalling 300 new code changes.

Swoosh!

Despite WPtouch Pro being a much larger plugin than its free companion, it still loads faster on mobile devices than WPtouch 1.9.x. That said, there’s lot of new features, settings and options, so when loading the WPtouch Pro admin on some servers it resulted in less optimal performance.

So we wanted to do better. We’ve re-factored code and reduced memory usage. We also made a variety of changes to many smaller aspects of the way our revolutionary admin panel works to slim and shave load times and improve usability.

Our admin panel is truly awesome, offering all settings for WPtouch Pro in one place— all in a clean, easy to use layout.

2.2— optimized JavaScript

What’s Next

With these major improvements completed, the focus for WPtouch Pro turns back to themes, so look for new theme additions in the coming releases ahead.

*Based on tests conducted on BraveNewCode.com running WPtouch Pro 2.2

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

1.9.21

WPtouch 1.9.21 (free) includes a few performance and maintenance improvements which improve interface responsiveness on iOS devices, and fix a number of reported bugs over the past few weeks.

WPtouch Pro 2.1 RC1

We’re finally here! It’s been awhile since we posted a new beta update. We’ve had lots of things going on over the past number of weeks, and have been able to get back on track and move towards completing 2.1.

Lots of fixes, changes, improvements and additions have been made, and this release is now at Release Candidate status, as its viewed by us as feature complete.

Changes for this release include both the iPad theme and the mobile versions of the Classic theme.

Here’s some highlights from the changelog for the release:

* Added: Web-App Mode supported on iPad
* Added: Deep Blue UI theme on iPad
* Added: Compatibility setting to remove short-code content in WPtouch Pro
* Added: Ability to select between mobile and iPad devices for developer mode
* Added: New icon set of Android Icons courtesy of androidicons.com

* Changed: Significant speed and load-time improvements in Classic theme
* Changed: Comment fly-in form on iPad: better handling of 3rd-party comment plugins
* Changed: Improved Web-App Mode persistence setting load time dramatically

* Fixed: Issues related to login, forms & search in themes
* Fixed: An issue which could cause the switch link to fail
* Fixed: Incorrect detection of BlackBerry Torch
* Fixed: An issue which could cause a blank space in the header area of themes
* FIxed: Issues related to the use of transparent light/white icons on iPad
* Fixed: An issue which caused scrolling to top after posts have loaded in mobile theme
* Fixed: Issue with missing pages in menu setup when two or more pages have the same name
* Fixed: An issue with the thumbnail mask appearance on mobile WebOS devices

Version 1.9.4.1

Version 1.9.4

• Fix for re-direct issues introduced with 1.9.3.4
• Fixes and changes for Adsense appearance
• Fix for direct messages not working with WPtouch exclusive mode
• Added spam check for Push direct messages via a nonce
• Added verification for Prowl API key
• Added ability to define custom user agents in the admin (go nuts!)
• Minor admin styling changes
• Dropped official support for WP 2.6 (sorry folks, you should update!)
• Dropped ‘skins’ references, they’ll be a part of WPtouch 2.0
• Compressed style.css in theme for faster load times
• Removed unused files

The update is available for download or from within the WordPress admin.

We hope that everything is shored up now with 1.3.2, so please upgrade and let us know. Most of the issues discussed in e-mails and on the WPtouch homepage seem to have been resolved from our end of testing.

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.

Since releasing WPtouch 1.0 a few months ago, we have received countless emails, 358 368 comments or pingbacks, and over 14,000 downloads. Given the admiration for WordPress that everyone here at BraveNewCode shares, we’re extremely proud of the accomplishment, and thank everyone for their support.

WPtouch 1.0 represents hundreds of hours of work on a development side, with a large number of hours also spent testing on Matt’s site and on various other test configurations we have. With each release, we have meticulously tested each version against various releases of WordPress, and against several server configurations to ensure functionality for all of our users. For a small three person team, we’re very happy with the end result and the exposure WPtouch has brought to BraveNewCode and to WordPress on the iPhone. Leo Laporte recently gave WPtouch a favorable recommendation, as well as Tod Maffin from the CBC. We appreciate the exposure, and will reiterate how committed we are to ensuring that the WordPress iPhone experience is revolutionary.

This last weekend Dale and I put most of the finishing touches on WPtouch 2.0. While it’s similar in functionality to the 1.0 releases, we’ve incorporated a lot of big changes that many of our users have requested. To name a few:

• Additional configuration options in the administration panel
• Integration will several third party plugins
• Additional javascript optimizations for faster loading times
• Full internationalization (i.e. language) support
• Support for mobile m.domainname.com names
• Full theming support, so users can create their own themes, and download new themes from BraveNewCode
• Default inclusion of several extra themes for added user customization

In addition, once the 2.0 release is in the hands of our users, Dale and I have plans to do a full administration interface as well, allowing full functionality and administrative control from an iPhone.

We’re also extremely pleased to announce that WPtouch 2.0 will be offered in several premium varieties as well. For those of you who are using WPtouch 1.0 that are completely happy with the features, rest assured that we’ll continue with a free version as well. But for those of you who want to stay at the cutting edge with the iPhone, we’re going to offer premium versions for commercial and non-commercial usage. These versions will have enhanced features, will automatically allow you to receive unlimited lifetime updates, and give users access to priority product support.

While we’re still playing with the price-points, we believe that we will offer a version for sites that are primarily non-commercial in nature, and a version for sites that are commercial in nature. With regards to the commercial version, we will also be incorporating Google Adsense into WPtouch.

For those of you who think the iPhone and WPtouch are a fad, I would offer the following; In March of this year, Google released data regarding internet searches. The data was so controversial in fact, that Google asked its engineers to process the data again. In the end, Google showed that 50x as many web searches were made with the iPhone than all the other smart phones combined. As a grand total, that number represented approximately 0.5% of the entire internet search market (including PCs), which for a relatively new mobile device, is absolutely unprecedented.

Since that time, Apple has released the iPhone 3G and has gained increased market share. We fully expect that mobile searches and internet surfing are going to continue to explode. With that in mind, we feel that spending a few bucks for an enhanced iPhone experience, complete with support, lifetime updates, and priority addition of new features, is well worth the expense. As we’ve shown with WPtouch 1.0, we’re absolutely committed to new features, a great iPhone experience, and maintaining our position on the cutting edge (as evidenced by the magnitude of releases we’ve done). We’re hoping every one of you will support our WPtouch 2.0 endeavors in the future, and we look forward to pushing WordPress to the extreme on the iPhone with each new release.

All the best,
BraveNewCode