How to Manually Update Marketers Delight

NOTE! As of MD4.5+, you only need to follow the upgrade instructions for the theme.

In the event you are unable to automatically update the Marketers Delight theme or any associated plugins, you can always turn to FTP to do it yourself.

Manual updates are simple to perform as all that’s really required is to upload a folder full of files into the right directory in your WordPress installation. This is the exact process the automatic updates do for you, so let’s take a look at how to do this ourselves.

Step 0: The Quick Way

If you want to avoid working in FTP, you can manually update your MD products another way through your dashboard.

Navigate to either Appearance > Themes (if updating the MD Theme) or Plugins > Installed Plugins (if updating an MD Plugin) and delete the existing theme/plugin.

Then, quickly, reupload the new .zip folder in the same manner you installed Marketers Delight to begin with.

I can’t recommend this approach but if you dislike working in FTP, this will do the trick.

Step 1: Download the latest version of MD from your account

From your MD account, go ahead and download the latest versions of whichever MD product you wish to update. Keep in mind the base of Marketers Delight is split into a theme and plugin, so pay attention to which you are working with.

The primary download for each product has a green button with the latest version number on it. Click the green button to download the .zip folder.

The folder names for each MD product follow a simple syntax:

• MD Theme: marketers-delight-theme-441.zip
• MD Plugin: marketers-delight-plugin-441.zip
• MD Addon: md-addon-name-10.zip

Normally to upload a theme or plugin to WordPress, you’d simply upload the zip files to the appropriate sections in your admin panel. But because we’re working with FTP, we need to access the raw folder. So this brings us to step 2.

Step 2: Unzip MD Theme/Plugin Files

Unzip the folders you wish to upload to your server on your local computer. You can usually unzip folder by just double clicking the file name. Keep in mind the theme will get uploaded to a different directory than plugins (outlined in the next step).

As you can see from the example above, unzipping the plugin file generates the marketers-delight folder. Make sure you don’t change the name of the unzipped file and upload it as is.

Note: The MD theme + plugin unzipped folders are both named marketers-delight so ensure that there are no extra characters after either of the folder names (sometimes your operating system will add a ‘2’ after the duplicate folder name). You can upload the folder like that to your server, but just be sure to change it to marketers-delight upon completion.

In the example I unzipped the MD Plugin folder, so I know that I’ll need to upload this to my /plugins directory in WordPress.

Step 3: Upload MD Theme/Plugin Files to the Right Directory

Luckily navigating through WordPress via FTP is easy. I won’t cover how to setup FTP in this tutorial, so I recommend you look into the following FTP programs and read their instructions for connecting to a web host:

• CyberDuck (Mac)
• Transmit (Mac)
• FileZilla (all)
• Coda 2 (Mac, recommended)

With your unzipped MD folders, go ahead and upload either the theme or one of your plugins into the respective folder in the /wp-content/ directory. Yes, you want to completely override the old folder with the new one in case your FTP asks.

Note: If you made any changes to the core files of MD, they will be lost during this update. This is why I recommend you make ALL coding changes through your MD Child Theme so you can perform safe updates without losing your customizations.

Note in the screenshot above that in the /themes/ and /plugins directory there are folders both names /marketers-delight/. Please ensure you don’t get them mixed up and upload to the wrong directory and they both retain the same name.

Next Steps

Once you’ve completely overwritten the old MD files with the new versions via FTP, check your site to ensure everything is in order. You may need to clear your sites caches for some of the new code to start working on your site or to clear up anything that looks off.

Each MD update is vetted to ensure compatibility and reduce the risk of breaking your site as much as possible. I’m proud to say that since MD4 was released last year in 2015 there haven’t been any major (or really minor) updates that have broken sites and there has been a lot of updates from then ’til now.

You should always follow best coding practices while working in Child Themes and minimize the amount of work you do in them unless you absolutely have to to ensure your Child Theme can smoothly go along with MD updates.

As Marketers Delight is a constantly evolving system, some things are bound to get changed as MD changes so I encourage you to create an account at the Kolakube Forums to report any issues you find and follow the MDNET blog for detailed breakdowns of what’s new in each MD update.