This is a general notice to all visitors who currently do not have a License for our WPtouch Pro, WordTwit Pro or Piggy products.

As of September 1st, 2011 The Community Forums on our Support site are being discontinued in favour of community support for our free products through the WordPress.org support forums.

All Community Forums will be removed and become inaccessible via bravenewcode.com/support.

You will still be able to access community support for our free products via WordPress’ forums.

Customers with Licenses for any of our premium plugins will not be affected by this change.

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.

WPtouch 2.0 Pro beta1 is now officially in the wild. The number of beta testers for beta1 is relatively small, so if you applied and didn’t get accepted, don’t worry too much as we’ll be adding more people for beta2.

WPtouch 2.0 Pro represents nearly five months of work between the two of us. The original features were hashed out over a few beers down in Punta Cana of November of last year. It became evident based on our initial discussions that in order to have the features we wanted we would need to do a 100% rewrite of the existing code, which is ultimately what we did.

Baby’s Got a Brand New Bag

2.0 is a complete mobile theming framework that was built upon a comprehensive plugin framework, both of which were created from scratch explicitly for this project. Under the hood WPtouch 2.0 constructs the entire administration panel programmatically, which means adding new features going forward will in most cases not require more than a few lines of code. It also means that mobile theme developers can easily add setting options to the WPtouch administration panel and have the majority of hard work taken care of for them.

Easily Extensible

One of the complaints developers had about WPtouch 1.x is that it wasn’t very easy to build upon. First, we didn’t have many plugin hooks that other plugin developers could tap into. Second, the default theme in WPtouch was fairly inflexible for people trying to add new theme features. We’ve addressed both of these limitations in 2.0.

All WPtouch 2.0 themes are based upon a theming example called Skeleton. It is our goal to continue to update Skeleton for each release, including support for nearly all of the WPtouch 2.x features. Skeleton can easily be cloned in the WPtouch 2.0 administration panel and used as a starting point for a completely custom theme, one that won’t be overwritten when WPtouch is upgraded.

WPtouch 2.0 also includes nearly 100 different hooks and actions that other plugin developers can tap into. In fact, many of the recent features added to WPtouch 2.0 utilized these same hooks.

The World’s Not So Big After All

All the text strings in WPtouch 2.0 have been properly internationalized. That will allow us to slowly translate WPtouch 2.0 into other languages. The first release of WPtouch 2.0 will have support for Italian, Japanese, Spanish, German and French. We’ll hopefully add a new language or two for each subsequent release.

The Beta Cycle

As WPtouch 2.0 is a 100% rewrite, we’re looking to our beta users to help us flesh out any of the issues that crop up in the wild. Beta1 will focus mainly on the administrational panel, the upgrade process, support forum integration, and general WPtouch 2.0 usage. We expect beta1 to last roughly a week or so, depending on any issues that turn up. We’ll be releasing periodic updates to beta1 to fix bugs.

Beta2 will be the second and last beta cycle, and will include the full suite of mobile themes and final functionality. Once we’re confident that beta2 is stable, we’ll release WPtouch 2.0 officially for everyone. So if you do the math, we’re only a few weeks from releasing WPtouch 2.0 for the general public.

Feature Set

There are over 100 new features not present in WPtouch 1.9. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Deep integration between WPtouch and the BraveNewCode support forums – users can post support questions directly from the WPtouch 2.0 administration panel
• Re-designed administrational panel featuring intuitive tab interface
• Admob and adsense advertising support in themes
• Support for multiple Prowl accounts
• New plugin compatibility disabler (prevent problematic plugins from hooking into WPtouch)
• New page/menu management panel that includes drag and drop functionality for icons
• All new theme designs and effects
• Inclusion of Skeleton theming example for developers looking to create custom mobile themes
• Ability to customize a welcome message for 1st-time visitors
• Inclusion of several new icons sets
• New nested menu system available to themes
• Inline comment replies and threading
• Support for web-application mode
• Ships with 5 professionally translated languages

And So It Begins

We want to thank everyone who applied to be a part of our beta program, and also everyone who was officially chosen to help with beta1. We’re very close to releasing WPtouch 2.0 Pro to everyone, something that we are quite looking forward to.

If you’re late to the party, you can sign up to be notified when WPtouch 2.0 Pro is released over at wptouch.com, or follow our updates on Twitter. We’ll post again when the second beta cycle opens up, at which point we can hopefully relay information about the final release date and price points for WPtouch 2.0 Pro.

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit around these here parts. Dale and I are pleased to finally pull the curtain back on our brand new website and let everyone finally take a look. The original brainstorming and planning behind this new version started months ago down in Punta Cuna. While we were always happy with our old site, we strongly feel that this new site will be able to grow at the same pace as the other aspects of our business.

Website Features

When we started re-architecting this site, one of the crucial aspects during development was that it had to be easy for us to manage. Being only a two person company, we could easily spend a good portion of every week managing and maintaining our website and internet presence. While we wanted a fully functional website, we also didn’t want to be a slave to the maintenance of it.

So to that end here is a brief description of some of the cooler features that are under the hood here.

Flickr Driven Portfolios

If you head over to our porfolio or our product pages, you’ll see we’ve added a lot more information. One area that we’ve beefed up is the product and portfolio image galleries. In the past, we manually added the images using the WordPress system, and while that worked, it wasn’t very fast or efficient. On this new site, we’ve tied all the image galleries into Flickr, so they are completely managed and updated using Flickr and associated tools such as Flickr uploader. All the titles and descriptions for each image come from Flickr as well, and given Flickr’s AJAX content editing interface, it is a real snap to edit content on each of the images.

Remote Plugin Information

Most of our plugins are updated every week or so, and keeping our website up to date with regards to the changes in each version used to be time consuming. On our last website, we finally started pulling some information in from the content on WordPress.org, and have enhanced that even further with this version. On all our plugin pages the download links, change log, last time the product was updated, and associated file sizes are all updated remotely from information over at WordPress.org. From our side, as soon as we check in a new plugin version on the WordPress plugin repository, the associated information will automatically update itself on BraveNewCode.com.

Enhanced Fonts

It’s a real shame that the Internet has essentially been limited to only a handful of web-safe fonts. While there are various technologies that allow the use of additional fonts, we finally came across one that we wanted to try on BraveNewCode: Cufón. As you can see, most of the headings are now in a dynamically generated font called Steinem. We felt that this font added to the look and feel of our website, and fit in well with the spirit behind the content.

jQuery Love

You’ll find sprinkles of jQuery effects and ajax around the site (for example the nice tooltips that pop up on download buttons), all of which was added to make navigation easier and to add some UI gloss to the website.

Jenga: More Than Just A Game

We had a little fun updating the content in a few areas, as evidenced by our spiffy new page talking about our website design and development practices. While we take pride in the work we do, we also like having fun while doing it.

Support Forums

We know that many of our plugin users have been aching for support while the support forums have been down. We apologize again, but it’s the only way we can truly complete our client work, continue to develop our plugins, and finish the overhaul to the forums themselves.

Still More To Do

Not everything is completed with the site revamp, and we’ll be adding more in the coming weeks ahead. Enhancements to the blog, portfolio and product areas, as well as the addition of user accounts here at BraveNewCode.

The New Frontier

We still have a lot to roll out in the next few months here at BraveNewCode, but our new website was a pretty big bullet point on our to-do list, and we’re happy to finally cross it off and share the end result with everyone. By all means, drop us a comment and let us know what you think. Look forward to some more great stuff from The BraveNewCode team in the near future. Happy surfing!