After some short delays and a few extra days of testing, WPtouch 1.8 is now available as an update through the WordPress administration panel, or as a download here on the website.

There’s been a considerable number of changes that are detailed in the readme.txt file, but we’re including most of them here with some extra notes.

Under The Hood The Engine Got A Scrub Down

Duane spent considerable time re-writing the core admin code, optimizing and restructuring the way WPtouch works its magic. Over and above the obvious reasons for doing this, we’re preparing for full tilt-a-whirl action with the release of WPtouch 2.0, a significant upgrade which will deliver the long-awaited internationalization and theme features.

As with any major change, we’ve done the best we could to test under a variety of conditions, but hope that feedback from you, our user, will help us weed out any additional hiccups as a result.

Manual Icons Are Bygone

Finally we’ve delivered a proper mechanism for the management of your custom icons through WPtouch. The upgrade to WPtouch is the last time you’ll have to say good bye to your custom icons with an upgrade, and have to manually replace them. With WPtouch 1.8 you can upload and delete your custom icons from the WPtouch admin panel, and future upgrades to both WPtouch and WordPress won’t affect your custom selections.

You’ve Got Style! More Options, Background Choices

We’ve has several requests to open up our rigid ways and allow for more customization of style options. While we do see the merit in this, part of our rigidity has to do with plans to allow for custom themes with WPtouch 2.0, thereby creating the ability for everyone to create tweaked versions of WPtouch or really unique, totally customized themes.

But WPtouch 2.0 is stilla few months away, so in the mean time we’ve added a few more style options.

So, added in this update is:

• The abilty to decide if paragraphs should be full width (default) or left-aligned
• The ability to choose between three different scales of font sizes
  (Regular, Medium & Large)
• The ability to choose between 3 different pinstripe background images
  (Classic, Horizontal, Diagonal)

Finding The Path To Home: Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed a number of path issues with WPtouch 1.8. As WPtouch is a complex plugin with features and functions that far surpass the average plugin its more difficult than it seems to bring all these great and advanced features to all kinds of WordPress users, hosting WordPress in unique ways. So we do our best with each successive update to make sure WPtouch looks in all the right places to find the things it needs to know about your WordPress install to work for you.

You Say Login, I Say Logout

There have been a few bugs related to login/out features working on some versions of WordPress, and we think we’ve solved them all. If you’ve had an issue related to this, please update and check to see if we’ve resolved it and report back.

We’ve also fixed a number of other minor issues, all of which are listed in the readme.txt file that accompanies the plugin .zip file.

Salam! Kaixo! Hej! Aloha! Salut! Hello!

WPtouch 1.8 has been prepared for internationalization. Over the coming weeks we’ll be working with some great volunteers to deliver WPtouch 1.9 in at least 5 languages, and we’ll work to try and at least double that for WPtouch 2.0. If you think you can help us accomplish this, please drop an e-mail to wptouch@bravenewcode.com and let us know what lingo you’re fluent in. If it’s a language not yet added, we’ll send the project details for you to help us out on Launchpad.

Coming Soon… And Then There Were Themes

With WPtouch 2.0, you’ll be able to do the same with themes. Custom style sheets, and even entire themes built off of the new core theme capabilities will bring the same great theming possibilities of WordPress itself to WPtouch. Stay tuned for information on our theme contest.

There’s a batch more things in this update, if you’re interested checkout the full list of changes here.

We’ve heard from you: each upgrade of WPtouch is painful, we know- you add your custom icons, get everything all set up… only to have to re-add and re-add them over and over again with each successive upgrade of WPtouch.

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.

Matt Mullenweg, our fearless leader has officially dubbed today, January 28th as Thank A Plugin Developer day. We would be remiss if we didn’t give a shout out to other plugin developers we love for their fine work.

Here’s a short list of some of our favourites:

• Akismet is a comment filter that uses a karma-type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. Does a killer transparent job at handling the nasties.
• Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless.
• WordPress Database Backup: You gotta gotta gotta backup your DB, folks. This makes it easy, and you can schedule them to be sent to your inbox daily/weeky/monthly too!
• WP-Cache is a caching program which takes the weight off your database, and helps with Dugg posts significantly, or if you’re like us and on Media Temple, keeping those GPU’s low low low.
• All-In-One SEO Take your search engine optimization seriously, kids. This plugin will help you take the pain out of painstaking SEO for your site.

There’s just too many great plugins available for WordPress, so head over to the plugins directory and poke around to check some out for yourself if you haven’t done so for awhile. If you like to find the plugins we’re behind, visit our downloads page.

Alright alright, enough already! We’ve received lots of mail from you international users requesting that we add localization to WPtouch, and we’ll be delivering it in the coming weeks.

When we do so, we hope that anyone who endeavors to do a really kick-ass translation in thier language will send us the .po/.mo files they’ve created (wptouch@bravenewcode.com) so that others can enjoy the same.

We’re also baking other minor fixes, additions, and changes into the mix. As always the full list of changes will be included in the changelog which you’ll find at the bottom of the WPtouch page.

We will be writing more about our WPtouch 2.0 roadmap in the weeks ahead, and hopefully you users out there can provide some feedback and suggestions when we release a public beta of it.

We’ve had over 5,000 downloads of WPtouch in its first month, recieved heaps of praise, and become the premiere iPhone & iPod touch WP theme enhancement plugin on the web, something we’re extremely proud of.

So with that in mind we’d like to offer a huge thank you to everyone who has helped to make both BraveNewCode and WPtouch a success so far this year.