Interested in joining our beta program and using the latest and greatest WPtouch release? Find out more here.
Want to follow us on Twitter? that’s here.
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.
I thought the iPhone/iPod touch/Android shows my
website just fine the way it is now?
Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.
a. Each load was done with an iPhone running 3.0 software
b. Full signal bars for each network
c. mobileSafari’s cache and history were dumped for each load
d. Reflects load-time average of 3 consecutive loads for each network speed
e. BraveNewCode.com is a well-optimized site (minified javascript & css), most sites are not as optimized
Well, what if my users don’t like it & want to see my regular site?
There’s an option in the footer with WPtouch for your users to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your site’s regular appearance, with the choice saving a cookie for future visits— it’s that easy. We even automatically put a little snippet of code for the switch link into your current theme which will be shown only to mobile visitors, giving them control to choose between the two site views easily.
Will it slow down my blog?
Not bloody likely! Unless of course you’re getting slammed with all sorts of traffic because you’ve installed this sexy thang. The theme package for WPtouch is small (200KB or so). It was designed to be as lightweight and speedy as possible, while still serving your site’s content in a richly presented way sparing no essential features like search, login, categories, tags and comments.
Donations
Several people have asked us if we accept donations for our work on WPtouch. We sure do! This plugin represents hundreds of hours of work, both in development and testing. We do our best to add new features weekly so that it stays at the cutting edge. We are thrilled with the response it has received, and are committed to providing new features and bug fixes in a timely manner. All donations received will help us achieve that and ensure that WPtouch continues to enhance the experience of WordPress on the iPhone.
If you’d like to donate (even a little’s a lot!), please visit our paypal page. Also, to show our thanks to our supporters, we’ve added an all-time WPtouch friends and family listing in the sidebar, so check it out.
So if you donate and would like to be a part of that, please let us know and we’ll make sure your personal or company name(s) & links is shown.
Latest Release Information
For the revision history on the latest release, checkout the Updates & Revision History Table Of Contents item.
IMPORTANT!
As of WPtouch 1.8 you no longer have to worry about losing your custom icons! Okay, you’ll lose them when you upgrade to WPtouch 1.8, but forever and ever amen you’ll never have to worry about it again! Simply use the new uploader tool in the WPtouch admin to upload your custom icons. You can even delete the ones you’ve added from the admin, too!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Upgrading
If you’re upgrading from a previous version, you can upload the new plugin files in place of your existing files (’../wp-content/plugins/wptouch’ folder). Your settings and icons will remain the same. If you’ve made changes to the WPtouch theme files, you’ll need to back those up for now. We’ll be getting around this in WPtouch 2.0, with the introduction of theme support.
We strongly recommend you use our theme files, as they continue to evolve towards more customization, and with WPtouch 2.0, you’ll be able to customize most of the theme yourself, save it as a new theme, and use it alongside our default theme, without losing any changes during an upgrade.
- Getting Started
Before you begin,
make sure you have a current backup of your WordPress installation and your database. If you’re new to a WordPress backup, you can read
this step-by-step guide from WordPress.org.
It’s highly unlikely anything will go wrong, but you can always be sure that it won’t matter by backing up… right?
- Requirements
To use the WPtouch theme & plugin on your host you’ll require a few things, some of which may be obvious to you but we’ll record them all here so we can say ‘we told you so’ if you don’t meet them.
YOU MUST
- Have a webhost capable of running WordPress 2.3 or higher (PHP 4/5 Supported)
- Have FTP access (if you’re not using WordPress 2.5 or newer) to install the theme plugin folder
YOU MIGHT
- Like iPhoney to look at your site if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch (Mac only)
- Want to download Safari and enable developer mode, then turn on the iPhone user agent in Safari and minimize the window width to see what your site looks like with WPtouch installed (Works for PC / Mac)
- Want a text editor that edits file in plain text to customize template files
- Want an FTP program to upload your files
(Free options: Windows: Filezilla / Macintosh: Cyberduck)
- Built-in Feature Set
WPtouch comes with a host of built-in features. Some notables include:
- User-selected theme toggle
(between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
- iPhone-like application appearance, functions
- AJAX, jQuery & effects in only 56kb
- The ability to turn advanced javascript effects & ajax on/off
- Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
- Theme native social bookmarking support
- iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
- Ajax comments, posted in real time
- Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
- Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
- Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
- Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
- Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
- Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
- Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
- Favicon fetch & conversion to .png for links displayed using the WP blogroll
- Support for FlickrRSS plugin, Blip.it video plugin
- Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
- Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)
- Automatic Links page layout with your blogroll links listed with their favicons (if you have or create a page called ‘Links’)
- Download, Installation, & Plugin Activation
To begin, start by
downloading the the latest version of the plugin if you haven’t already.
Once downloaded, unzip the folder somewhere on your computer where you’ll have easy access to it.
When you unzip it, you should see the ‘wptouch’ folder.
Before we go any further, we’ll assume you already have WordPress 2.3 or greater installed and configured for these instructions.
Next, upload the entire ‘wptouch’ folder to the WordPress ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory on your webserver, and once uploaded visit your WordPress admin panel in your web browser. Navigate to the ‘Plugins’ tab, and activate the WPtouch iPhone Theme plugin.
Okay, you’re now running WPtouch, without any of the theme’s options configured.
*NOTE: This theme has not been tested with the majority of different plugins available for WordPress. That said, it *should* be fine to use with many of the plugins. The general caveat here is that if you’re running some other plugin that formats your website for mobile viewing for the user agents supported (iPhone, iPod Touch & Android), it will likely interfere with WPtouch.
If you need assistance with the WPtouch plugin, please visit the WPtouch support forum.
**IMPORTANT Make sure you follow the below tutorial, as after activating the WPtouch theme for your site no pages will appear in the theme’s drop down menu until you visit the admin page and turn them on and select the paired icons.
- Admin Options
WPtouch comes with an admin panel for setting page and icon configuration. Also included on the admin panel is a compatibility suite which will help with setting up pages automatically display supported WordPress archive and links functions, as well as help with detecting supported or conflicting plugins.
After you’ve downloaded, installed and activated WPtouch, you can proceed to the Settings tab, then select the new ‘WPtouch’ tab from its submenu.
Your WPtouch admin page will look something like this:
The top admin pane shows the latest news from us (BraveNewCode) about WPtouch.
The next pane allows you to select the 6-digit hex colours for the header background and title. You can also choose the link color which is used through the theme.
The third admin pane (Post Listings Options) allows you to select which post meta details will be displayed below post titles on the index, archive, and search pages.
The fourth pane, (Available Icons) explains that these icons are available to be used with corresponding pages set in the pane below. You assign one of these icons per page, and they’ll show up in the drop down menu of the theme and on your pages themselves beside page titles.
The fifth pane (Logo/Bookmark Page & Menu Icons) is where you select your log/bookmark icon, and the pages of your site to be shown in the WPtouch drop down menu, & the icons you want associated with them.
You also select the icon you wish to have as your blog title logo- that’s the logo displayed beside your blog’s name in the header bar of WPtouch. This logo will also be automatically used as your bookmark icon- that’s the icon that iPhone and iPod users will see when they add your site to their home screens.
***By default, the default.png icon will be selected. If you want to use your own icon, simply drop a 60×60 (.png preferred) image into the ‘/plugins/wptouch/images/icon-pool’ directory on your webserver, refresh the WPtouch admin page, and select it as your icon.
The last pane (Companion Support) shows plugin, WordPress built-in function, and pages support and compatibility. It will help you setup your WPtouch installation and guide you in having photos, archives & links pages configured with built-in WPtouch support.
Once you’ve set all your options, click save settings to activate your choices. You can change these settings at any time. Any new plugin activations (e.g. FlickrRSS) will be reflected in the Companion Support area, showing you what you’ll require to have the plugin work with the theme.
- Template Switch Code
As of 1.3, we are automatically injecting the switch links into your existing theme, so as long as you have the <?php wp_footer(); ?> code just above the </body> and </html> tags in your footer.php template, everything should work smoothly.
If you’re upgrading from version 1.2.1 or earlier, don’t forget to remove the old switcher links.
*The switch links will not be shown to visitors arriving at your site in standard browsers- only iPhone and iPod touch users will be able to see the links and switch between WPtouch and your regular theme.
- Solving WP-Cache Incompatibility
WP-Cache is an excellent plugin which helps take the load off your WordPress install and serves your dynamically created WordPress pages in cached form, refreshing the cache only when changes are made to your pages, or the cache expires.
So, when working with a plugin like WPtouch, WP-Cache will prevent your visitors from seeing the custom theme because it has stored versions of your site’s pages and it will serve them first before it serves the custom theme WPtouch applies.
In order for WPtouch to work with your website if you have WP-Cache installed and active, you’ll need to add the iPhone and iPod touch user agents to the Rejected User Agent strings options on the WP-Cache admin page.
To do this, visit the WP-Cache admin page, and scroll down to the section where you can enter custom user agents that will be prevented from being sent cached pages of your site. Simple add ‘iphone’ and ‘ipod’ to the user agent strings, and save your changes. Now empty and refresh your cache, and visitors arriving on the iPhone or iPod will now see the WPtouch theme correctly.
WP-Cache will now reject your iPhone or iPod touch visitor requests, and serve up your site un-cached to them, while maintaining your cache for regular visitors.
If for some reason you do not have the ability to enter custom user agents from the WP-Cache administration page, then that means you will need a modified version of WP-Cache. We’ve made a few modifications to it to always allow filtering based on a User-Agent string. You can grab the unofficial 2.1.3 version here (we’ll be contacting the author to do an official update some point soon).
- Updates & Revision History
(Here's the complete changelog for past versions)
Version 1.8.9.1
- Fixed refresh issue (some pages keep re-loading)
- Fixed mkdir issue on PHP4 installations
- Set viewport to fixed width for device to prevent some sites from loading wide
- Minor revisions to new CSS calendar icon styling
- Added exclusive mode feature to help in situations where other plugins are incompatible, load too many scripts/css files and both break and slow down WPtouch
- Added Fancybox for some feature descriptions in the admin
Versions 1.8.1 to 1.8.8
- Changed calendar icons from images to CSS-based only (they look sexay!)
- Refined styling of header logo, text shadow, general appearance
- Removed unneeded declarations from the WPtouch stylesheet
- Tested and works efficiently with WordPress MU when installed site-wide (Finally!)
- Disqus commenting plugins out-of-the-box styling enhancements
- Changed post nav on the single post page to prev/next post, instead of entry titles for length's sake
- Fixed bug related to RSS feeds being broken in some situations
- Fixed fatal error on line 153 undefined 'is_front_page' function for WP 2.3.x users
- Fixed jQuery failing to load for WP 2.3.x users
- Added option for font-zoom on rotate for accessibility, on by default
- Fixed various styling bugs
- Changed switch link in WPtouch to remain fixed width
- Fixed various content overflow issues in WPtouch theme files
- As a note for WordPress 2.3 users, WPtouch 1.9 will require WordPress 2.5+
- Fixed new switch link to work under different WordPress install scenarios
- Fixed switch link CSS style-sheet loading issues in some situations
- Fixed missing mime types for icon upload through IE7
- Fixed issues related to automatic favicon generation on a Links page
- Changed footer switch links to mimic iPhone settings app appearance
- Fixed misc scenarios for ajax-upload errors
- Fixed path issues related to custom icons (sites on windows servers)
- Fixed issues related to ajax comments not working in some situations
- Added check for 'Allow Comments' on pages
- Fixed Apache error (reported in logs)
- Fixed admin styling issues on IE7, Firefox
- Fixed issue with custom icons and the header logo
- Fixed issue with the Classic background not appearing
- Significant rewrite of core code for increased efficiency
- Changed database calls to use wpdb object, will hopefully work with wpmu
- Internationalization preparation of the admin and theme files (for WPtouch 1.9)
- Added ability to add/delete custom icons that survive WPtouch & WordPress upgrades
- Added ability to select left/full text justification, 3 font sizes
- Changed how WPtouch admin panel shows icons, more room for custom icons
- Added channel capability for Adsense
- Now suppresses banners created by the Ribbon Manger Plugin
- Minor tweaks to login, register, admin links, footer appearance
- Minor tweaks to drop down menus, header styling
- More refinements for search, categories & tag pages, 'load more' link
- Text & code refinements in the WPtouch admin
- Experimental support for the Blackberry Storm
- Fixed issue with WPtouch header title display issue
- Fixed issue related to login/logout/admin/register link path issues
- Fixed issue where Bookmarks link when Advanced JS is turned off
- Fixed issue with default icon case
- Fixed issue with switch code on systems with PHP4
- Fixed issue related to fresh installs
- Fixed issue with Android and the sub-header menu links not working
Version 1.7
- Added option to do GZIP compression
- Suppressed warning about multiple gzhandlers
- Fixed user agent detection code
- 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
- Fixes for categories drop-down menu (now shows post #'s)
- Minor fix for categories drop-down menu
- 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)
Version 1.6
- Auto-resizing images in posts/pages on orientation change!
- Auto-resizing WP image galleries
- Better support for captions on images, gallery items
- Added the ability to enable a quick login button w/ drop-down in the WPtouch header
- Added the ability to enable categories as a drop-down item in the WPtouch header
- Added the ability to disable WPtouch automatic homepage redirection (resolves white page issue)
- Added the ability to manually select a re-direct landing page
- Refinements in WPtouch admin
- Enhanced support for WordPress 2.7 admin
- Re-designed post comment bubble icon
- Input box to inject custom code (Google Analytics, MINT, etc) into WPtouch
- Basic support for Incognito & WebMate browsers on iPhone & iPod touch
- Other code fixes, cleanups & optimizations
- Other theme style cleanups and enhancements
Version 1.5
- Added support for WordPress image galleries
- Added support for single post page split navigation
- Fixed admin footer links which did not locate WordPress install correctly
- Added basic Google Android support
- Changes in WPtouch admin appearance and styling
- Added donate message in WPtouch admin
- WPtouch now supports WordPress 2.3 or higher
Version 1.4
- More jQuery tune-ups, now loads through wp_enqueue_script() or Google to prevent collisions
- Changed $J to $wptouch to prevent collisions using jQuery
- Offloaded jQuery loading from our folder to Google instead for WP > 2.5 sites
- Fixed a bug in wptouch.php on line 232, fixing drop-down menu display issue
- Fixed a bug where blank admin options were allowed instead of refused
- Fixed a bug with overriding the site title in the WPtouch admin
- Fixed some instances where ajax comments would not work
- Fixed a bug where the loading of javascript files would load in your site's default theme
- Enhanced drop-down menu appearance
- More compatibility with other plugins
- Code cleanups and optimizations
Version 1.3
- Tweaks for the jQuery bugs
- No conflict setting added for jQuery
- Support for DISQUS 2.0.2-x Plugin
- Minor style edits and enhancements for the search dropdown
- Another fix for drop-down Menu not working
- Added ability to change the header border background color
- Fix for slashes appearing before apostrophes in the header title
- Admin wording changes, styling changes
- Minor style enhancements to the theme
- Fix for Menu not working on some installations
- Style enhancements for the menu, search, drop downs
- Style enhancements for comments, logged in users
- Font adjustments for titles
- Style changes for single post page heading, for better clarity
- Admin wording changes
Version 1.2
- Fix for the theme appearing in Safari browsers
- 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 ability to disable Gravatars in comments (more control over optimization & speed)
- Redundant, unused template file cleanups (archive.php, search.php & page.php are now all just index.php)
- More style enhancements and tweaks, fixes
- Switched to Snoopy from CURL for the admin news section (thanks to Joost de Valk (yoast.com)
Version 1.1
- The ability to disable advanced javascript effects (fixes effects not working for some, speeds up the load time considerably)
- Proper styling of embedded YouTube videos on mobileSafari in iPhone 2.0
- Fix for the switch code not working on some blog installations
- Redundant, unused code cleanups
- More style enhancements and tweaks, fixes
- the ability to enable/disable the default home, rss and email menu items
- support for WordPress installations that have static home pages
- dynamic WPtouch news in the administration panel
- the ability to modify the default hyperlink color
- major CSS & PHP cleaning, resulting in reduced size and faster load times
- the ability to enable/disable tags, categories and author names on the index, search and author pages
- support for DISQUS commenting
- CSS refinements for comments, the drop-down menu, and overall appearance
- styling for YouTube embedded videos
- bug fixes for blogs installed in directories other than root
Version 1.0
- Initial release
- Support
Looking for WPtouch support, or to discuss an issue?
Visit our new Support Forums.
