After months of hard work WPtouch 2.0 Pro is ready for some beta testing love. We’re looking for a small group of dedicated testers to help make it as solid, safe and snappy as possible. If you’re interested in joining the beta program please read below on what we’re looking for before deciding to dive in.

General Information About The Beta Program

The WPtouch 2.0 Pro beta program is for the paid version of WPtouch. Beta testers participating in the program will receive a copy of the WPtouch 2.0 beta, and gain access to a private beta forum on our Support Forums to log issues and discuss the release.

Once installed, new versions of the beta will be released through the admin panel in WordPress. When the official 2.0 release is available, testers can upgrade to it through the admin from the beta as well.

Beta testers should be aware that WPtouch 2.0 Beta 1 is incomplete. We will issue updates to the beta over the coming weeks to improve stability and complete features, and we’ll ask for new rounds of review with a list of changes for testing.

As with any beta release, we expect to see bugs and issues which (though unlikely) may affect the stability of your WordPress environment. It is not recommended to join the beta program unless you are comfortable with beta releases and feel capable of restoring software and databases associated with your WordPress setup. That said, we don’t anticipate any serious issues or concerns with the betas.

Areas Of Focus

We ask that if you are interested in a beta of WPtouch Pro that you fall into at least 1 of 3 categories:

1. You’re interested because of the many new features, and want to try and help improve the new theme(s) it offers
2. You’re interested in designing/developing a custom theme with the new Skeleton
3. You’re damn good at finding bugs and testing software, and think you can help us with your awesome bug squishing abilities

Requirements

To join the WPtouch 2.0 Pro beta program, we require the following:

1. You have or create a BNCID* (to assign the license and forum access)
2. You have a WordPress.org self-hosted website running WordPress 2.9.x
3. The necessary admin credentials to upload and activate plugins on your WordPress installation
4. That’s it!

*You can register for a BNCID by clicking the ‘Register’ link in the header of this website.

For beta 1 we will only be testing on 2.9.x. WPtouch 2.0 Pro will support WordPress 2.8, 2.9, and 3.0 officially, but our focus for beta 1 is on current versions of WordPress.

The purpose of the beta program is to harden and shore-up any issues related to the working functionality of the software, so we’d kindly ask that you do not publish reviews of the WPtouch 2.0 betas as product reviews at this time.

We’d also ask that you resign yourself to being a top-secret spy and not spreading information and details about the plugin before we do, if at all possible. We’re not crazy like Apple but do appreciate solidarity!

Enough Already! Gimme A Copy!

Hold your horses! First thing’s first: there are a limited number of spaces in the beta program.

We’ll contact those who want to join on a first-come, first-serve basis. We’ll send out a welcome mail and fill you in on the details if you’re in the group. If not, don’t worry: WPtouch 2.0 Pro will be released in June, and that’s not far off!

Register for the WPtouch 2.0 Beta

Updated: The beta registration is now closed.

Steve Jobs reveals the iPad

Apple announced the iPad today, and at first I have to say I was underwhelmed, though just hearing the chatter regarding the launch on Gizmodo, Twitter, Ars Technica and other tech news sites at the time.

This evening I took some time to watch the keynote video posted by Apple, reviewing the whole 1+ hour love-in of Apple’s ‘Latest Creation’. Afterwards I had a few new takeways and a few more positive thoughts about the device, its potential, and where BraveNewCode might fit in with its impact.

Though I still remain a little skeptical about the net worth of a device like this in my own life, I think for a good many others this might be something that really helps push computing to a new level in their lives, and brings great web content to that many more people.

Capabilities

It sure seemed to me that the full breadth of the device’s power and ‘Magic’ won’t be understood or known until it’s held in the hands, much like the iPhone for many people. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve handed my iPhone over to who, in just a few minutes start grasping what all the chatter is about. I think the same will hold true for this device, and over time as more 3rd party apps are built that harness its potential its wow factor will increase in multitudes.

mobile(BIG)Safari

Safari is touted as ‘the world’s best browser’ by Apple, and in testing for things like the Acid 3 test, it does indeed stack up as such. So what would the best browser in the world feel like on a large, crisp touch display? I’d have to think it’d be pretty nice, and the demos given by Jobs surely do give the impression that that’s the case.

So while it dwarfs the power of mobileSafari on the iPhone and really does put the power of the internet in your hands (minus, of course, Flash) I was left thinking about whether something like WPtouch would be at all desirable on a device like this.

WPtouch Possibilities

There are no doubt many who will think that the attention given to mobile website customizations and solutions (of which WPtouch belongs) do not or need not apply on a device such as this. I think they’re wrong, or at least, not thinking about it as creatively as they could.

Just as there’ll be revolutions for iPad apps created by iPhone app developers that are already making great apps for the iPhone and iPod touch (cough, Loren Brichter) I strongly think there’s a whole new breed of touch browsing customizations that can be brought to websites which not only enhance the the experience of browsing a website, but also improve upon it, taking advantage of the intuitive input method that is touch. A great example of this occurred during Phil Shiller’s demonstration during the keynote of the touch-specific gestures and capabilities built into Apple’s new iWork suite on the iPad. The way that a user is able to perform certain tasks on the iPad are far more intuitive, simple, powerful and fast when compared to the mouse/keyboard input paradigm.

There are of course things that are more difficult on a device like the iPad, or iPhone. In these cases thoughtful consideration about how to reduce or eliminate these barriers will enhance and improve a user’s experience of a website or web application, and minimize the barriers to e-commerce, great content, and so forth.

So with these ruminations in mind I think that BraveNewCode is ideally positioned to look at what these kinds of improvements and advantages might look and feel like. Because we love WordPress so much (just like you probably do, too) we think that adding unique and powerful support for this new breed of web browsing and publishing devices is a must for the active community of WordPress users who will likely be iPadding in the near future.

The Waiting Game

But for now, we’ll all just have to wait a few months before we can get our hands on one, or settle for dabbling with the latest SDK.

The way WordPress upgrades plugins is out of our control- so when you upgrade through the admin each time a plugin is moved out of the plugin folder, and the new one unzipped into it while the old is deleted.

What we can control is the creation of a folder for WPtouch in the WordPress uploads folder, which won’t be touched by WordPress, even when you upgrade WordPress itself.

With WPtouch 1.8 you’ll be able to upload your custom icons (securely) and select & activate them- and even delete them! And each time we release a new update you’ll never have to worry about your custom icons disappearing again.

We’ve also worked on hardening WPtouch a little and fixing some more bugs, so we think it’s a great update for everyone.

Look for it soon.

If you’ve downloaded 1.7-1.7.4, please update to 1.7.5 to fix the issues identified post-release.

First of all, a big thanks to everyone who posted in the comments, left us tweets and mailed in to report on the state of WPtouch 1.6 and the kinds of bugs they experienced & features they’d like to see— your feedback is invaluable to us.

We’re driving hard toward the big 2.0 release, which will see some remarkable changes, including (finally) localization for international users and themes. WPtouch 2.0 will ship with 3 default themes to choose from, to further customize your site’s appearance on the iPhone, iPod touch, Android and soon, Blackberry Storm.

We’ll also be adding a small documentation guide for aspiring designers and developers to work on their own WPtouch themes, which we’ll index and provide for download for free on the website. To stimulate some growth here, we’ll be having a contest with some good prizes for those who create some stellar themes. It’ll be a great time for WPtouch users the world over.

WPtouch 1.7.5

We considered issuing a small maintenance release to fix a couple of missed bugs with 1.6, but instead decided to hold off as they weren’t widespread and turn our focus to continuing to add features alongside solving pesky issues.

Below is the complete changelog for 1.7.5:

• Added option to do GZIP compression
• Added ability to choose if WPtouch or regular version of your site is shown first
• Fixed WP login/out button bugs
• Added login/out auto-detect for WP 2.7 or pre-WP 2.7 sites
• Fixed loading path issue that caused drop-down menu button to fail
• Added choice between alphabetical or page order sorting of the drop down menu
• Added clock icon
• Minor admin fixes & changes (+ better Mozilla browser support)
• Fixes for categories drop-down menu (now shows post #’s)
• Automatic detection & support for Peter’s anti-spam plugin
• Built-in support for Adsense in posts
• Moved Stats tracking box beside Advertising Options
• Better WordPress version support detection
• More refined image auto-sizing with WP added images & galleries in posts / pages
• Fix for WordPress shortcodes appearing in excerpts
• Changed how WPtouch shows switch links
• Auto-adjusting width/height for MobileSafari plugin objects (YouTube, Quicktime)
• 1.7.1: Fixed re-direct bug when viewing default theme from mobile device
• 1.7.2: Fixed missing Android support
• 1.7.3: Fixed broken login link on some installations
• 1.7.4: Fixed a warning that occurred when multiple gzip handlers were enabled

Download

Feel free to head on over to the WPtouch page to download the new version, or use the auto-update mechanism in your WordPress admin to install it. As always, we love to hear feedback from our users, and will continue to add new features and functionality going forward.

What’s Next?

We’re working on better Android support, built-in tie-in with WordTwit & twitter, localization, themes & more. Stay tuned.

A hearty congratulations to everyone involved in building the new WordPress- we’ll continue to submit our bug reports as usual and heap praise from the blogosphere!

WPtouch

As an addendum, we’ll be testing our WordPress on iPhone plugin?WPtouch to ensure full?compatibility, and will wrap that into the next release (1.6) which includes new features and bug fixes, due out soon.

For anyone who doesn’t run WordPress and can’t use something like our WPtouch plugin, we highly recommend taking a look at Christopher’s offering.

We’ve added an often-requested feature, kinda.

Some have complained that the search & menu drop downs don’t work, along with the post-excerpt drop down functions, ajax, etc. Those effects are all done using Prototype-based javascript. On some installations, users may have other plugins which are loading similar scripts, and because WPtouch doesn’t interfere with the loading of those plugins, the scripts get loaded with WPtouch and effectively disable its effects and advanced features.

So we decided the best way around that was to create a fucntion which would change the way that javascript effects work with WPtouch, and bypass the loading of Prototype altogether. This has multiple advantages:

• Fixes the broken drop downs, replacing them with DOM javascript actions
• Kills 100KB of javascript from having to load, speeding up the loading of WPtouch considerably
• Loading WPtouch-enabled sites over 3G is now FAST! Even on EDGE, the speed is now very comfortable (this depends on what other plugins you use, and the scripts they load, however)

For those of you who have no issues with WPtouch the way it is, the advanced javascript will still load just fine, and the regular features that WPtouch employs will work just fine. You may want to try both, and see which you prefer.

What’s Included?

- In addition to the new javascript control feature, we’ve added:

• Proper styling of YouTube embedded videos in mobileSafari running on iPhone’s with the 2.0 software
• We’ve also baked in a fix for some of you who had issues with the switch links (between WPtouch and your site’s regular theme)
• A number of styling tweaks were made, cleaning up the appearance of shaded text, and some spacing issues for longer post and page titles
• A number of corrections and cleanups for redundant code

The update is available through your WordPress admin panel for WordPress 2.5+ users, WordPress’ plugin repository, and through the website, here.