November 2013 - WPtouch

WPtouch Pro 3.1 Update: New Theme, Extensions

We’ve just released WPtouch Pro 3.1, a major update to our flagship WordPress mobile plug-in. 3.1 contains a variety of fixes, updates, and improvements, and also support for all-new themes & extensions.

Previously WPtouch & WPtouch Pro were one-theme products. With the introduction of WPtouch Pro 3 in May we made it a three-theme product, but we weren’t done yet.

In 3.1 we’re introducing a new theme, and also support for what we’re calling Extensions, mini plug-ins to enhance your WPtouch Pro setups.

New Theme: Bauhaus

Bauhaus

Bauhaus is an all-new theme, and is meant for a wide variety of websites. It supports all of WordPress’s modern features, including thumbnails and featured images, custom menus, and custom post types.

It’s design is heavily influenced by the design movement of Bauhaus.

Based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, Bauhaus design philosophy believed that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts.

It also depended on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering.

This new WPtouch Pro theme is not just aesthetically based on Bauhaus design, but its architecture (along with the core of the plugin itself) has been engineered to meet the needs of modern WordPress websites.

Extensions

With WPtouch Pro 3.1 we’re introducing mini plugins called Extensions. Extensions enhance functionality and are specifically designed for WPtouch Pro.

Responsive Images (Enterprise Licenses)

Finally, truly responsive images! The Responsive Images extensions automatically crunches and serves the right size images for different devices. This offers significant performance gains on image heavy websites, leveraging our BraveNewCloud^™ service to send devices requesting your pages the appropriate size of image, fast.

Leveraging the Cloud and CDNs, the WPtouch Pro Responsive Images Extension solves a significant problem for today’s mobile web.

Infinity Cache — 5x Faster Pages! (Small Business Licenses or higher)

Boost your WPtouch Pro installation with cache capabilities specifically designed for mobile & WPtouch Pro. You can even use Infinity Cache for your desktop theme, too! Infinity Cache is designed to be a simple, powerful caching extension to improve page speed load times dramatically.

Lead Developer and Co-Founder Duane Storey benchmarked Infinity Cache on his travel blog, The Migratory Nerd recently, and got some startling results:

MOBILE PAGE LOAD

Infinity Cache Off

Transaction rate: 6.34 trans/sec
Transaction rate: 6.85 trans/sec
Transaction rate: 6.63 trans/sec

Average: 6.61 trans/sec

Infinity Cache On

Transaction rate: 30.77 trans/sec
Transaction rate: 30.30 trans/sec
Transaction rate: 32.26 trans/sec

Average: 31.11 trans/sec

Improvement: Nearly 5x faster!

Use Infinity Cache and Responsive Images together to maximize your WPtouch Pro-powered mobile WordPress website page speed and size— you’ll be amazed at the results. No other mobile solution for WordPress offers this kind of power, flexibility and ease-of-use.

Mobile Content — Swap Out Content For Mobile Visitors (All Licenses)

With the Mobile Content Extension you can easily add a text area meta field to posts and page editing screens in your WordPress admin and show custom content only displayed to mobile visitors, instead of your desktop content.

Most of the time you want the same content showing for both mobile and desktop visitors. For many posts and pages this is the preferred and simplest way to use WPtouch Pro.

Though sometimes you want mobile visitors to see something different. Formerly, you could use WPtouch Pro’s shortcodes to display mobile-only content. With the new Mobile Content Extension, you can now just enter the separate content easily in its own text area on your posts or pages. It’s the best of both worlds.

Now Available!

WPtouch Pro 3.1 is now available to all customers!

November 12, 2013 — By WPTouch Admin

Why WordPress Makes Mobile Easy

WordPress is hands-down the best publishing platform on the web for making mobile WordPress websites. I wanted to share some insights I’ve learned after working the past 7 years on WPtouch, our popular WordPress plugin for making WordPress sites mobile.

Visitors Want Mobile Content, and It’s Easy To Provide It For Them

In The Age of Apps you might think you need an app for your WordPress website to satisfy visitors. While it’s true that the majority of smartphone users tend to use applications over mobile web, they’re most dominantly using apps for social networks like Facebook and Twitter— which in turn are filled with links to web content just like yours. And when users open those links inside mobile apps, its clear in recent studies that they prefer mobile-formated content that loads quickly and is easy to navigate.

I’ve come to love how WordPress really makes adapting to the mobile revolution as simple as installing themes or plugins. Making sure your WordPress website is mobile-ready usually costs less than $100/year to ensure a high-quality mobile experience. Options range from free WordPress themes which are ‘responsive’ to WordPress plugins which serve websites that are larger or changing and growing like our WPtouch Pro. Generally, plugins offer more control and fine-tuning for a mobile version of your website than most out-of-the-box responsive themes. Some of the better responsive themes I’ve seen are paid themes, and offer more quality. No matter which you choose though, the fact that you have a wide variety of options shows both the popularity of WordPress as a publishing platform and its flexibility in delivering mobile web content.

You can Publish Easily From Mobile

WordPress offers native mobile apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and others to publish on the go from your smartphone or tablet. These apps are polished and a joy to use, and the teams behind their development work tirelessly to resolve bugs and deliver quality. Personally I don’t publish often via these apps, but frequently use them for editing posts and pages or approving comments— all of which you can do easily and simply without having to pop on the web and login to your WordPress website.

In the past 7 years I’ve witnessed the mobile revolution and watched the web embrace both designing and creating content from mobile devices— no other publishing platform out there offer so many powerful, polished and awesome tools for mobile than WordPress!

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