BraveNewCode Support Forums 2.0

We’ve launched our brand-new Support Forums today, the long-awaited redux for our previous forums which we took offline late last year.

Significant effort went into the new forums, as we re-built them from scratch on bbPress 1.0.2. We’ve added lots of little details to hopefully make our forum experience easy and intuitive for our users, such as: Simple, clear uncluttered views of topics and forums, helpful hints and reminders for publishing topics and replies, Ajax publishing for topics and replies, Ajax favourites and tagging, and much more.

We’ve also added a Bug Reporter Tool available in the forums (available for registered members), for easy filing of those types of issues which we can’t offer a fix for in the forums but can log and track and hopefully resolve in upcoming releases.

BNCID

What’s a BNCID? Simply put it’s an account you create that will hopefully make doing things BNC-related super simple. It’s one account that we’ve planned out to:

• Make comments on the blog under your BNCID username
• Start topics and reply to topics in the forums
• Manage product licenses for any products we may release in the future
• Gain access to special promotions, offers, discounts, etc
• Manage your e-mail subscriptions to blog posts
• … and more!

We’re still building things out for the BNCID accounts, including the account page itself where all the managing of account details and features will take place. Eventually a BNCID holder will have this single page that will let them manage all account features and see blog/forum activity.

It’s something that we really haven’t seen done with WordPress yet that we really think is a must when you build a large, diverse website with several account features such as what we have planned for BNC.

So head on over to the forums and take a look around!
We hope you enjoy them!

~The BNC Team

WPtouch and Themes

We’ve said it before and it bears repeating: Themes for WPtouch is a lot more difficult than it may seem.

Since we’re aiming at WordPress 2.7 and higher we’re going to take advantage of the parent/child theme capabilities in WordPress. Wherever possible and practical we’ll always favor support for native WordPress capabilities and features.

This means that if WordPress introduces something like thumbnails in posts functionality (forthcoming in WP 2.9), we’ll add support for it over other third party solutions.

Cutting down on plugin bulk is something we enjoy about WordPress, making great (former) plugin features and capabilities a part of its core and reducing the need for third party solutions to be added in order for a smaller subset of functionality (like post thumbnails).

It’s a tough thing because some plugin developers that have their work enveloped into WordPress may have had other ideas. We think that the whole nature of a plugin for WordPress is to fill or add functionality which is ‘essential’ for a subset of users. Occassionally (and more often, progressively) the subset becomes wanted by almost the entire WP community, and such features should then be a part of the core.

Themes are tricky with WPtouch for a number of reasons, but most notably the way that our users can choose, apply, customize and maintain themes requires significant code and UI considerations.

We just simply won’t put out a half-baked solution. Its not the BNC way and it’s not what people have come to expect when using our plugins. So rest assured when it does arrive (and it indeed will) Themes and WPtouch will be enjoyable, easy to use, and powerful.

We’re back on the horse this week, and we’ll continue to update and improve existing branches of our plugins while we work towards re-launching the website, support forums, and larger plugin updates.

Below is a list of recent changes for both releases, enjoy!

WPtouch

• Added Twitter updates menu item support for WordTwit’s new features
• Added CSS for TweetThis and AddThis plugins to be hidden
• Added page/post title to HEAD for Tweet purposes
• Added user agent detection for non-apple mobile devices to be served Twitter link correctly
• Added 180-degree animation to post-arrow dropper and removed excess JS and code
• Added new tab pane for the header (menu, tags, categories, account)
• Added more theme compatibility for other touch devices
• Added ‘edit, delete, spam’ links for admins on comments
• Changed default OBJECT and EMBED css to only apply to .post, not site-wide
• Changed comment ajax routine
• Changed ‘Links’ appearance adding support for link categories, removed favicon scripts
• Changed the way the header links are setup
• Small refinements in the theme CSS all-around
• Made progress towards reply and pagination in comments, not there yet

WordTwit

• Added fixes as suggested by majilab for tweets & languages
• Fixed bug with Twitter display times in WPtouch
• Added ability for WPtouch to display recent tweets in header
• Added a widget to show recent tweets
• Updated minimum WordPress version requirement to 2.7
• Fixed a CSS bug on avatars
• Admin js and css files now only load on WordTwit Options page
• Validated the admin XHTML with W3C standards

Support Forums Outage

The support forums will be down as of 12:01am EST on Thursday, November 19th, 2009. We’re upgrading and changing our support forums and service, and as a result will close the forums until the new ones are launched.

We apologize for this, but there’s no way we can continue to answer all questions while re-launching.

Rest assured we’re hoping to make many improvements, so when things are up and running again they should be much better: )

Thanks,

The BraveNewCode Team

We encourage everyone to head on over to the support forums and look around. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know. And on that note, we’re off to Cancun!