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.

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 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.

There will be a few official themes to choose from when we launch, all of which will take advantage of the same settings and features of the original theme. But you don’t have to rely on just our theme releases, because we’ve built support for the ability to create your own custom themes and select them as well.

Developers?

So of course, if you’ve already modified WPtouch to your own liking, we want to hear about it. Get in touch with us and if we like what you’ve done, we’ll set you up to convert your theme to be WPtouch 2.0 compatible. In exchange for your hard work we’ll provide you with a free copy of WPtouch 2.0 when it’s released with free upgrades for life as well.

It’s really simple to create your own theme: copy the default folder to the /custom folder in the wptouch directory, and start editing! We commented lots in the template files to help guide you as to what’s editable and what’s not if you want to maintain the customization features and admin options. When you’re done, simply change the information inside the theme_info.txt file (theme description, author, URL) and it’ll be reflected in the WPtouch admin as a custom theme now selectable.

As we move along we’ll host the custom themes on the site for people to browse and download.

Don’t Overwrite Me!

We’ve also changed things around so that your custom themes and icons won’t get overwritten when you upgrade WPtouch. WPtouch will only overwrite itself and the official themes and icons, leaving your changes intact.

We’ll release more details and some screenshots & screencasts in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned.

Style Is Everything

While we recognize that many of you are content with the original “iPhone-application-like” design that WPtouch employs, we also recognize the opportunity to foster some really unique implementations by supporting and encouraging themes. We look forward to seeing what everyone can come up with!

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