Recently Google began the GoMo initiative, an online campaign to increase awareness of the importance of having a mobile-specific version of your website for your visitors.

WHAT IS A MOBILE SITE AND WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?
Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn’t mean it’s mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions.

The GoMo website includes useful information and powerful statistics to show you why going mobile should be an important part of your online business plan & future.

It will also allow you to test your website, and will give you a ranking of 1-4 in terms of the quality of the mobile experience you’re offering visitors.

Lastly it provides a small, non-WordPress list of vendors that assist in building mobile sites. We’re not yet listed, but that will likely change, and folks like us will be included.

Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Sites

Google also recently announced that mobile site optimization now affects your AdWords Quality Score. This means that serving ads to mobile visitors with a mobile-optimized website will earn you a higher rank.

The AdWords system will automatically visit your landing page, and evaluate your site as viewed by smartphones. However, if you already have a mobile site, we recommend confirming with your webmaster that you’ve configured your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.

So in both cases, WPtouch & WPtouch Pro powered WordPress websites score perfect and will help you both with your business presence online in an increasingly mobile ‘webscape’, while also improving your Adwords quality & revenue.

It’s been a couple months since the last release of WPtouch Pro, but that’s not because we weren’t hard at work on it! We decided to focus our efforts with fixes, additions and changes into a major point release, so 2.4 bakes in a huge list of updates.

Retina Startup + Landscape Startup on iPad

We’ve long wanted to support retina startup screens for Web-App Mode on iOS for the iPhone 4 (and now iPhone 4S). We’ve been waiting on Apple to implement this feature, and with iOS 5 they finally have. So 2.4 supports adding a retina version of your startup screen image if you’d like to use one.

Additionally, it’s now possible with iOS 5 to add a Landscape version of the startup image for iPad. effectively now you can offer startup screens in your WPtouch Pro Web-App in exactly the same way that native apps can.

FitVid.js

In WPtouch Pro 2.4 we’ve added the fitvids.js jQuery plugin, which takes your object, embed, iframe and html5 videos in posts and pages and automatically scales them based on orientation, and screen size. In WPtouch Pro 2.4 your videos will always look great.

Aloha! iOS 5 Native Scrolling

As if the above wasn’t enough, we’ve also added iOS 5 native scrolling for Web-App Mode on mobile, and replaced the javascript scrolling we used on iPad with iOS 5 native scrolling.

iOS 5 on iPhone & iPod touch

Now in Web-App mode the header remains fixed like native apps, while the body content scrolls in native speed and momentum.

iOS 5 on iPad

The result is a smooth scrolling experience, coupled with access to features in mobileSafari which were previously impossible on iPad like text selection. For previous iOS versions on iPad, the scrolling method will gracefully degrade.

♥ Android

Along with several styling and appearance improvements for Android devices, we’ve also added support for ontouchstart and ontouchend to Android. This speeds up interacting with the UI and makes for a more native experience.

The Whole Story

For a complete list of changes for 2.4 you can visit the support posting about the new release (you need to be logged in with a pro account), or view the change log in the read me accompanying the update.

“What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.”
~ RAY EAMES

It’s almost September, and here at BraveNewCode the fall is always a productive time. Last year we were hard at work in the fall delivering the 2.1 update for WPtouch Pro which brought child themes, iPad support, and a slew of new capabilities. We were also busy launching Piggy, our mobile web-app for WordPress e-Commerce sales stats, and also began work on WordTwit Pro, the premium version of our popular WordPress to Twitter publishing tool.

Today

We’ve been humbled by the success of WPtouch and WPtouch Pro. To date, WPtouch (+ Pro) runs on over 25 million WordPress websites worldwide, encompassing both self-hosted WordPress.org websites and WordPress.com hosted websites. The simple, elegant and easy-to-use nature of our plugins coupled with our attention to detail and customer care have made us the #1 choice for mobile presentation of a WordPress website, and for this we have to thank our users and customers.

WPtouch (free version)

The free version of WPtouch is regularly maintained, and in recent updates we’ve added some small features, expanded 3rd party plugin support and increased security. We’ll continue to do so going forward, and at some point in the not too distant future we’ll hand-down some of the Pro features to WPtouch.

WPtouch Pro 2.x

There are a few milestones we’d like to reach with the 2.x series of WPtouch Pro. Specifically, more performance and speed improvements both to its themes and the admin panel. Improvements and enhancements in media handling to make it easier to publish audio, video and photos with WPtouch Pro are also planned for the 2.x release series. Improvements and enhancements on iPad are also coming alongside the release of Apple’s iOS 5 software update, due this fall.

The Marketplace

Inevitably, more competitors are entering the mobile market with WordPress and trying to cash in on our success and the popularity that mobile + tablet devices are enjoying worldwide. There’s certainly room for competition and we’re inspired by the WordPress development communities’ creativity.

It seems that WPtouch Pro is the gold standard in mobile plugins; competing products are only now adding some comparable features that WPtouch Pro users have enjoyed for over a year now. It’s exciting to see that our innovations have made an impression, and mobile plugins are expected to offer a baseline of features that we pioneered with WPtouch.

Even Further

We’d like to revolutionize the way mobile themes are made once again. We’ve examined usage and feedback we’ve received and are inventing new ways to approach mobile theme creation and curation. We’re also looking at improving theming options and the extensibility of WPtouch Pro.

We hope customers are going to love what we’ll be delivering with WPtouch Pro down the road.

~The BraveNewCode Team

WordPress 3.2 has two changes that may affect some users: the minimum PHP and MySQL versions required will be PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. That means PHP 4 will no longer be supported by WordPress itself.

As a plugin developer, PHP 4 definitely makes life more complicated. Plugins end up becoming bloated when you need to have separate code for both PHP 4 and PHP 5. Removing the dependency on PHP 4 allows WordPress to remove old code and help streamline the entire codebase.

What does that mean for the users of our products?

Both WPtouch Pro and Piggy currently work with later versions of PHP 4 currently. Some time after WordPress 3.2 comes out, we will deprecate support for PHP 4.

Internally our policy has always been to try (when possible) to support the last two major versions, so when 3.2 comes out we’ll be supporting it and 3.1. But as development proceeds on the next version of WordPress, we’ll remove the PHP 4 aspects from our code and start using PHP 5 exclusively. That allows the code to be smaller, newer (usually more efficient) and we can use PHP 5 functions only, which in general results in a faster development cycle.

WordTwit Pro, which has just been released requires PHP 5 already.

So if you’re a WordPress user you should start looking at what your host provides in PHP support to make sure you’re ready when 3.2 is released. On many hosts switching to PHP 5 is as simple as clicking a button in the hosting control panel, and on others you can usually add a small snippet to your .htaccess file. Unfortunately there are still some hosts that do not provide PHP 5 at all, and for those you will probably have to find an alternate host, or explain to them why they should add support immediately to allow their customers to upgrade their WordPress installations.

WordPress, Meet Twitter

Today we’re excited to reveal what we’ve been working on for the past few months: WordTwit Pro, our premium version of WordTwit, the best WordPress to Twitter publishing plugin.

In WordTwit Pro you have complete publishing control over the tweets you send out using its sleek new publishing widget. Set schedule, repeat & delay options for a new status update; select and publish to multiple Twitter accounts; Authorize those account for shared use among other WordPress authors on your site; easily add custom hashtags and more— all on-the-fly in a few clicks with the new WordTwit Pro publishing widget.

Multiple Account Bliss

In WordTwit Pro you can easily setup multiple Twitter accounts for publishing. And it’s easy to decide which accounts WordTwit Pro will publish to, on a completely per-post basis.

WordTwit Pro also supports setting accounts as shared or private— perfect for multi-author websites to control the publishing options available for each contributor, author or editor.

And you can even authorize other authors to add their own Twitter accounts securely.

Scheduling Galore

As with the free version, WordTwit Pro can immediately publish a tweet about your new post to Twitter. Now with WordTwit Pro we’ve added easy to use scheduling, which allows for multiple tweets to be published to Twitter separated by the time you specify, on a per-post basis.

For example, you can now:

• Delay the first tweet from publishing right away for a certain amount of time
• Specify that a tweet be published multiple times, at the interval you choose
• And do both!

Custom #Hashtags

We’ve also added another often-requested feature, but went over-the-top in our implementation: totally custom hashtag support.

Instead of just accessing WordPress’ categories or tags to use as hashtags, we’ve built our own hash-tagging system which allows you to quickly and easily add hashtags to your tweets.

It also smart— the new publishing widget provides you with a list of your popular/recently used hashtags and in a few clicks you can add the ones you want to a tweet.

So whether you’re adding a hashtag that’s totally new or those you use often— it’s a breeze to add hashtags to your WordTwit Pro tweets.

Click To Edit

We’ve also added a new Manual Mode for the publishing widget. Simply click to edit-in-place your tweet’s text, title, tags and link. It’s 100% control over the tweets you’ll send out if you need it.

Per Post/Page

It’s also one click easy to decide whether a new post you’re publishing will have a Twitter update published with it. No more excluding by category— just simply flip the widget off with its publish toggle… that’s it.

Tweet Log

With the new Tweet Log you can see past tweets, upcoming tweets, and any errors that occurred, and what the error message was from Twitter.

Manage, control and delete right from the Tweet Log— you now have more control after you click the ‘Publish’ button.

 

 

Awesome Admin Panel

 
To top it all off, WordTwit Pro features the same intuitive, easy-to-use admin panel that we designed for our WPtouch Pro and Piggy plugins.

With its BraveNewCode admin panel, you can change settings, control your WordTwit Pro setup effortlessly, and do it all in style.

Licenses & Pricing

Licenses for WordTwit Pro include timely, professional customer support in our Support Forums, free upgrades through all 3.x releases, and automatic-upgrades in the admin panel, just like you enjoy with WordPress’ regular plugins.

License types:

$39 — Single license:
Includes support and auto-upgrades for one WordPress website

$79 — 5-Pack license:
Includes support and auto-upgrades for up to 5 WordPress websites

$139 — Unlimited/MU license:
Includes support and auto-upgrades on an unlimited number of WordPress websites, including WordPress MU/Multisite implementations

Available June 10th, 2011

WordTwit Pro will be available for purchase on Friday, June 10th, 2011. Click here to view the product page with even more detail about its features and capabilities.

One More Thing… Private Beta!

There is also a private beta available to all WPtouch Pro and Piggy customers, available today in the pro support forums. You’ll need to be logged in with your WPtouch Pro and/or Piggy account to view the post and access the download for the beta.