Today we released updates to WPtouch and WPtouch Pro that provide improvements to some of the functionality included in the 3.8 release.

WPtouch Pro’s desktop theme shortcode handler has been given improved support for sites that use a mix of theme and plugin shortcodes (in particular Royal Slider), as well as more robust handling of delayed shortcode registration.

We have received a fair bit of feedback since the release of 3.8 about the new system for preventing cache plugin conflicts. Following the successful completion of additional testing and compatibility validation, we are delighted to remove the requirement that WordFence’s Falcon cache engine be disabled on sites that wish to run WPtouch or WPtouch Pro in this release.

Our thanks to everyone who has reached out to us with comments and questions. We value every opportunity to hear your feedback.

Should you have difficulties with the cache plugin warning system, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via [email protected] or (for Pro customers) by opening ticket on our support site.

Today we’ve released new versions of WPtouch and WPtouch Pro— a major release which includes many new changes, enhancements, bug fixes and optimizations. We’ve also released updates for a number of our themes and extensions.

WPtouch & WPtouch Pro 3.8

In the core of the product, we’ve made several improvements. In the admin we’ve improved the styling and design of the Theme & Extensions page, and improved styling for non-English languages, including RTL languages.

Smart Conflict Detection

Over the years we’ve seen many users and customers face a common conflict which isn’t a “bug”— caching plugins. Popular solutions W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and Wordfence— are all great plugins to speed up your WordPress website. Yet, due to the nature of the way that these caching plugins work (caching dynamic pages and making them static), there’s no way to know that they’re not setup correctly to work with WPtouch.

You may have encountered the issue yourself: users often tell us that WPtouch is “showing my desktop theme on mobile” or “showing my mobile theme to desktop visitors”— both signs that you’re running a cache plugin and it has cached pages indiscriminately, and is serving them to devices just the same.

In 3.8, we’ve added new abilities for WPtouch to detect these plugins, and suspend WPtouch from running until the problems are resolved. When we detect you’re running any of these plugins we’ll put up a notice in the admin with a message link to our resource on modifying your cache plugin configuration to get them working together nicely. Once you get them setup correctly, we can detect this and will release WPtouch to start serving mobile visitors. This prevents poisoning your cache until you get it setup.

Themes & Extensions

We’ve also released some bug fixes for our extensions like Infinity Cache & jQuery Enhanced, along with updates for Bauhaus, MobileStore, Open and Simple themes.

In particular, MobileStore gets the largest update with new options for controlling the appearance & layout, and also gains better compatibility with older versions of WooCommerce (we’re looking at you, 2.1 users!). Improved support and compatibility with 3rd party payment gateways has also been added.

Today we are happy to release a slew of updates, including updates for WPtouch, WPtouch Pro, themes and extensions.

ZOOM!

In WPtouch and WPtouch Pro you can now easily enable/disable page zooming. While WPtouch has long been designed to work without page zooming, we recognize the desire for some customers to offer that capability with their mobile sites, and in keeping with best practices for accessibility we’ve added the ability for visitors to zoom the page as needed when enabled.

Translations

WPtouch and WPtouch Pro also includes many updated translations. The product is available in over two dozen languages, and we continue to support and maintain these languages regularly using professional translation services for our users and customers. Boris Raczynski kindly provided several suggestions for improvements to our German internationalization that led us to commission a complete overhaul of the translations in that language.

We’ve also added other improvements based on customer feedback. Due to the prevalence of international sites that maintain content in their language but prefer an English admin, Open, one of our themes for business, no longer relies on WordPress’s internal translation mechanism to localize certain date information. Open now also provides the option to disable the background it places behind the site logo.

MobileStore Theme Update 1.1

Also included in today’s release is an update to our popular MobileStore theme, which works to transform a WooCommerce installation to offer a mobile-tailored experience. MobileStore 1.1 includes the ability to disable our off-canvas mini-cart and ajax-based add-to-cart mechanism— for customers with other plugins that interfere or would prefer not to use those features.

The release also includes number of minor improvements and fixes, and aims to improve compatibility with other plugins, checkout solutions and 3rd party enhancements that work with WooCommerce.

New Extension: jQuery Enhanced

Today we also released a new extension, jQuery Enhanced. The extension adds the ability to use the latest 1.x or 2.x CDN-hosted versions of jQuery instead of WordPress’ stock versions. It also adds the ability to choose whether jQuery and its dependent scripts load in the header or footer, further optimizing your mobile theme and improving Google PageSpeed scores. This extension is freely available to all customers running WPtouch Pro 3.7.9 (and up).

Infinity Cache Update

This release also includes important performance updates to Infinity Cache. The regular expression engine was modified, and now results in additional files being added to your specified CDN. For CDN users, this will undoubtedly result in a performance increase. We’ve also removed the dependency on MaxCDN, as many of our customers are using other CDN providers. Simply enter the associated pull domains from your CDN provider and WPtouch Pro will work properly with your CDN.

Advanced Type Update

When we heard that a small number of customers were experiencing difficulties getting Advanced Type to save their font choices, we didn’t expect to run into issues with a PHP feature that had been deprecated six years earlier! We’ve improved our handling of cases where magic quotes are enabled, and complex settings such as those maintained by Advanced Type now work as expected for sites running older PHP releases.

Get It Now!

If you’re a Pro customer, update to WPtouch Pro 3.7.9 today see the new extension and theme updates.

If you’re using the free version of WPtouch, you can update through the WordPress admin Plugins page to get the latest version.

As always, you can see the complete changelog for this release on the WPtouch Pro 3 Changelog page.

With Google’s April 21st deadline looming, we want to make sure that WPtouch offers the easiest possible way to get your WordPress website mobile friendly.

Since WPtouch 3 was released, the plugin has undergone many changes with ever more features and functionality added. Although most features have been immediately visible in the WPtouch admin pages, we have kept some (less frequently used) options hidden unless the WPtouch admin mode was switched to ‘Advanced’.

In today’s releases for both the free and Pro versions we have eliminated the Advanced admin mode. Those features and settings are now immediately accessible in the WPtouch admin. We have also simplified settings, substituting automatic behaviour for some options that are no longer useful, are replaced by better solutions within the plugin, or encourage poor practices.

Of course the 3.7.5 releases also include a number of other improvements, including better compatibility with page builder and social icon plugins, bug fixes, and theme tweaks.

Whether you’re looking to get your website ready for Google’s mobile search changes next month or have been a long-term user of WPtouch, we’re confident you’ll love the improvements we’ve made in WPtouch 3.7.5.

Shortcodes are a truly remarkable feature of WordPress. They make it possible to easily add advanced functionality and features to pages, inject content into posts, and more. In the past, site owners have had to rely on plugins to add shortcode capabilities to their site but recently some developers have started including them in their WordPress themes. It’s an attractive proposition for site owners: buy a theme and instantly get advanced functionality without chasing down a handful of plugins.

Trouble with Shortcodes

But WordPress is forgetful. It only remembers how to handle shortcodes for one page request and must re-learn every shortcode each time a page is loaded. It is this forgetfulness that makes it possible to activate a new theme and instantly have a transformed admin experience! And usually, with plugins registering advanced functionality, it works great. After all, plugins are loaded on every request, regardless of which theme is active.

If you’ve ever swapped out your WordPress theme to one that doesn’t have the same shortcodes, though, you’ll already be familiar with the problem: WordPress suddenly can’t understand the shortcode and leaves it in your pages and posts unprocessed!

WPtouch Pro works the same way: when the plugin steps in to take care of your mobile visitor, it begins by telling WordPress to set aside your desktop theme and use your chosen mobile theme instead. If your content has relied on shortcodes from the desktop theme, you may have seen unprocessed shortcodes appear in your posts and on your pages.

Making Progress

The same problem existed in the past with custom post types. We made big progress with custom post types in 2014 enabling WPtouch Pro to learn about the custom post types used in your site and then re-registering them when your site is accessed. As a result, WordPress always knows they exist, and is able to load your content for mobile visitors.

Although in the past we’ve encouraged site owners to make use of our ability to load your desktop theme’s functions.php files to try to fix this issue, the complexity of modern WordPress themes has made this less useful than it has been in the past. After reaching out to major theme framework developers to try to find a resolution to the shortcode problem, we determined the time had come for a complete re-think of our approach.

A new approach – and a solution

Today shortcode compatibility for mobile visitors is taking a huge leap forward with WPtouch Pro 3.7. With just one click you can enable our all-new shortcode handling, which loads your page and post text as though the desktop theme had been active all along.

Although this new feature will take care of almost all needs, you may need to use WPtouch Pro’s custom code feature to include any styling/scripts relied on for advanced functionality such as content tabbing.

The WPtouch Pro 3.7 update is available now for all customers with an active license, via your WordPress dashboard for licensed sites and the Account page here on wptouch.com.

We’re excited to finally be able to share this development with you and look forward to your feedback and to seeing what you do with WPtouch Pro.

OK, I missed New Year’s Eve by a month–but there is still have much to celebrate: the release of WPtouch Pro 3.6.6 and a whole new support system!

If you haven’t updated WPtouch Pro since we emailed you in November, you’ve missed a fair bit! We added tools to help you manage your WPtouch Pro license from inside the plugin in 3.6.2.

In 3.6.3 we reworked our theme & extension system to automatically update whenever you update the WPtouch Pro plugin. And throughout we’ve made improvements and updated translations across the entire plugin. Many of those have carried across to the free edition, too.

After almost two years of trying we finally accepted that our support system was getting in the way more than it was helping us provide you with great support.

If you logged in to wptouch.com this week you will have seen the all-new My Account page, with license management tools, renewals, past purchases, and more all in one place.

We have moved tickets and the knowledgebase (now called ‘Solutions’) to Freshdesk, a great customer support system that lets you get help from us more easily than before.

Best of all, there’s no new account or password needed: you still login via wptouch.com.

As always there are a variety of updates in 3.6.6.

Newly added:

• The ability for themes and extensions to disable Web-App Mode.
• If you set a custom excerpt for your posts, WPtouch will use it when it displays related posts.
• Support for category hierarchy in MobileStore

Changed:

• More localization updates (German, Greek, Hindi, and Indonesian)
• More robust category listing
• Updated link for support, etc. to point to our new ticket & knowledgebase and the new My Account page.
• Because Web-App Mode is not compatible with off-site payment gateways, MobileStore no longer allows Web-App Mode to be used when no compatible gateways are found.Read out more about MobileStore and Web-App Mode in our support article.
• MobileStore now allows selecting a custom latest posts page.

And Fixed:

• A bug in MobileStore where it was not possible to completely disable product filters once any had been selected.
• Layout bug in menu on sites with sequential nested menu items.

We’re excited about what we’ve got planned for WPtouch Pro in 2015. Thanks for your continued support!