August 14, 2015 — By WPTouch Admin

WPtouch 4: Customize your website for mobile devices like never before!

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Full Customizer Support

With WPtouch 4, we’ve redesigned our admin panel and added native support for the WordPress customizer.

Unlike responsive themes, you can control exactly what your visitors will see when they visit your website on a mobile device.

Setting up a WPtouch theme has never been easier: Play with colours, fonts, logos in just a few clicks, all while instantly live-previewing your changes.

Experiment with featured sliders, post and page options. Tinker with featured images, social sharing, and menus— and when you’re done, simply save and publish and go live.

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New Wizard

In WPtouch 4 we’ve added an all-new setup wizard to guide you through getting started with WPtouch. The wizard makes sure you’re made aware of the things you need to do to get setup quickly, and even helps you along by automatically discovering your WordPress environment.

Use Google Analytics? WPtouch 4 can tell, and will automatically add your analytics code into its themes. Use a different template for posts and your home page? WPtouch will configure them automatically, yet also lets you choose something different (if you want to change it for mobile visitors).

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Streamlined Settings

If you’re configuring a theme’s appearance, that’s all done in the WordPress theme customizer now, where it should be. Setting up menus for WPtouch? That’s done in the WordPress menu settings, too. In WPtouch 4 we’ve examined the entire setup process to make more sense for you, and flow logically.

For example, a new user will go through the setup wizard to configure key settings, then on to the customizer to choose appearance settings and experiment with look and feel. Going from activation to publishing your mobile website has never been as clear and easy.

For all the settings that don’t belong in the Customizer Settings, they’re all in one new location, the WPtouch Settings. There you’ll be able to modify the “under the hood” options, along with adding or activating additional themes and extensions.

WPtouch 3.x Support

When you update to a new major version of WPtouch you don’t want to have to setup a theme all over again. In the past we made major changes that we weren’t able to rectify with older WPtouch installations. In WPtouch 4, you don’t have to worry— all 3.x themes running WPtouch 3.5 or newer will “just work” with WPtouch 4.

In development for 4.0, we left 3.x themes intact and worked rigorously to ensure that they could live in the 4.0 world without issue. Our team poured over configurations and different scenarios to ensure that we maintained full backwards compatibility with any custom or copied theme(s) you’re running today.

WPtouch 4 themes offer more control and customizability in the WordPress Customizer, but 3.0 themes will also benefit from the customizer and a variety of their settings will automatically work with the WordPress Customizer when you update to WPtouch 4.0.

Cost

We think WPtouch 4 is by far and away the best version of WPtouch we’ve ever made. After hundreds of releases, 8 million downloads and nearly a decade of work, our team has created the most polished, professional and powerful mobile tool for WordPress websites. And we want to see everyone using it and enjoying it.

When it’s released this fall, we’re happy to announce that WPtouch 4.0 will be a free update for all licensed customers.

Along with 4.0, all new updates for themes and extensions that are included with your license will also be free.

If your license expires soon, renew today to ensure you receive the 4.0 update.

There’s lots more packed into 4.0, and we’ll have some blog posts over the coming weeks to highlight them all.

Not a customer, but interested in receiving updates directly to your inbox? Sign up for the WPtouch mailing list today.
We send out infrequent, periodic updates on what’s new in the WPtouch world.

April 21, 2015 — By WPTouch Admin

The Google Mobile Search Algorithm Change Begins Today

As many of our customers and readers know, today is the day when Google officially starts to rollout its mobile algorithm changes that will favour websites with mobile-friendly versions. In terms of its ultimate impact, many SEO experts are estimating it will be larger than both the disruptive Panda and Penguin updates combined.

Achieving Google Mobile-Friendly Status with WPtouch Pro

Achieving Google Mobile-Friendly Status with WPtouch Pro

WPtouch Pro is a Google-recommended mobile-friendly solution for WordPress, and most users who purchase it can achieve mobile-friendly status on their entire website in less than five minutes. Compared to the cost of reworking an existing website to achieve this, or starting from scratch with another commercial theme, the lack of time and financial investment required by WPtouch Pro to achieve this important status with Google is an easy decision for our customers to make.

We thank everyone who has trusted WPtouch Pro to help their WordPress websites achieve mobile-friendly status, and as always, we are here to help new customers who are unsure how to proceed. For most people, it’s just a matter of adding WPtouch Pro to their existing website and activating the plugin from the Plugins menu in WordPress.

July 10, 2014 — By WPTouch Admin

Help Build A School

Syed Balkhi contacted us recently from WPBeginner and told us about a really great cause that he’s been involved with for a few years – helping to build new schools for children. Last year WPBeginner helped raise enough money to build a school for 12 children in Guatemala, and this year the goal is to build two.

WPtouch is an official gold sponsor for the project, and we’re honoured to be involved and have our donation help a cause such as this. To help raise additional funds, we’ve thrown in five Small Business licenses as well which will be given away as prizes. Many other great companies have also donated prizes as well, and by supporting the cause you’ll have a chance to win some of them as well.

If you’re looking to help out and also have a chance to win some cool prizes, then please head on over to WPBeginner’s Help Build A School post and take a look. You can also visit the donation page direction at Pencils of Promise.

Thanks in advance to everyone who donates or takes time out of their day to read about the cause.

June 14, 2014 — By WPTouch Admin

Continuity & Features in iOS 8 + OSX with WPtouch

Recently at its WWDC Conference Apple announced new features for iOS 8 that should significantly improve user experience on a number of fronts. We’re looking forward to all these enhancements, especially how they’ll compliment WPtouch-powered websites.

“Handoff”

continuity in iOS and OSX

If you missed it, Apple announced new features which make it easier to move between iOS devices and desktop computers. Handoff was one of them, and with it comes the ability to load webpages synchronously moving between Safari on iOS or Safari on a Mac.

Because WPtouch uses the same URL to load your website content, you can expect Continuity between web browsers on mobile, tablet and desktop computers to work great with WPtouch. Visitors will be able to seamlessly access your content, unlike other services or solutions that use different URLs for mobile webpages.

Speed in Web Apps

Until iOS 8, web-apps and native apps that used web containers did not benefit from the browser engine enhancements previously added to iOS (specifically the Nitro JavaScript engine).

In iOS 8 the gap between Safari website view and web apps is now closed, so WPtouch’s much-loved Web-App mode feature will be faster than ever. We hope additional features might become available for Web-App Mode (since it’s early in the beta releases for iOS) and we’ll add them as they become available.

Credit Cards, Logins

For websites with eCommerce solutions or require login, iOS 8 adds improvements and enhancements that make entering credit card information easier and moving between devices and maintaining logged in states much improved, and any website using WPtouch will be able to benefit from these enhancements automatically.

iOS 8 will be released this fall, and we’ll make sure WPtouch will be updated alongside it to add support for the new features and capabilities.

January 8, 2014 — By WPTouch Admin

Introducing BraveNewCloud + WPtouch Pro

bravenewcloud and wptouch pro 3.1

Recently we released WPtouch Pro 3.1, a major update to our flagship mobile plugin for WordPress. A solid two months of work went into the latest update— we introduced a new theme, 3 extensions, and improvements to the best platform for mobile development for WordPress websites.

BraveNewCloud

WPtouch Pro 3.1 introduces the BraveNewCloud, a revolutionary new feature for a WordPress plugin. With the BraveNewCloud you can now seamlessly install & update WPtouch Pro themes and extensions inside the admin panel.

The BraveNewCloud operates seamlessly within WPtouch Pro, and allows you to receive updates for themes and extensions as we release them. You no longer have to wait for a new version of the plugin in order to receive updates for themes and extensions. This allows us to ship more timely bug fixes and improvements to themes and extensions.

Including a cloud install inside the product like this wasn’t easy, and marks the first time any WordPress plugin has accomplished this feat.

Bauhaus: A New Theme, Theme Updates

Bauhaus

With 3.1 we’ve introduced a fresh theme, Bauhaus. Available absolutely free to all existing customers.

Contemporary design and full-featured flexibility are highlights in Bauhaus. Subtle hardware-accelerated animations and clean clear typography make Bauhaus stand out as a polished and powerful, modern mobile theme.

Classic Redux, CMS & Simple

New features, refinements and fixes are also included for all our existing themes. Hotly requested features like user login have been added, while support for iOS 7 (particularly in Web-App Mode) bring all of our themes freshly up to date.

All-New Extensions

Ever since the launch of 3.0 we’d planned to add extensions that help you take your WPtouch Pro install to the next level. With 3.1 we’ve added 3 new extensions and we’ll roll-out more this year.

Mobile Content Extension

Ever wanted to provide content on a post or page completely different from what your desktop visitors see? With the Mobile Content extension, you can. This extension adds a new text area on posts and pages in the WordPress publishing area, and allows you to enter whatever content you’d like to show differently for your mobile visitors.

Responsive Images Extension

One of the biggest issues facing responsive design these days has to do with images— since all webpage assets are served regardless of screen size in a responsively designed website, authors are forced to serve higher quality images (for larger screens) at the expense of larger web page sizes. This slows down websites when they load on a small screen device like a mobile phone, even though they don’t need large images.

With our Responsive Images extension, we’ve solved the problem. The extension swaps out larger images for smaller ones where available, since WordPress creates differently sized images for every uploaded image (full size, large, medium and small). It’s an extension that is literally activate and go— yet you can also add CDN capability to serve images based on geo-location for extra speed.

Infinity Cache Extension

Infinity Cache handles both mobile and desktop caching!

It even caches mobile visitors who switch to your desktop theme, ensuring all visitors are served lightning fast page views no matter how they choose to visit your website.

If you already have an existing caching plugin for your desktop website, you can also use it in conjunction with Infinity Cache- your existing plugin will cache desktop pages, and Infinity Cache will handle all the mobile agents set to pass through it to WPtouch Pro.

Unlike so many complex cache solutions available for WordPress, Infinity Cache is simple and straightforward, and does caching right without worry. It truly is a “set it and forget it” type of cache solution.

Available Now

The WPtouch Pro 3.1 update with BraveNewCloud is free to all existing customers, and you can upgrade through the WordPress admin like any other plugin today.

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.

WordPress mobile

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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