It’s great to be back: Introducing Marketers Delight 6.0

Well, this post has been a long time coming. It’s been a few years since you’ve heard from me, the same guy who was emailing you almost every week with exciting new launch posts for a humble little WordPress theme called Marketers Delight.

During that time, the MD theme has been rethought, rebuilt, and finally released as MD6.0. The theme itself is now free, the Drop-ins ecosystem has grown, and the website has been redesigned to explain how it all works.

Don’t worry: if you purchased a lifetime license in the past, that promise is still being honored. Log in to your account to check your status and start downloading the new theme and Drop-ins right now.

Before I get to the new shiny things, I owe you the short version of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Kolakube Labs.

Where I’ve been

My name is Alex and I have been building websites and selling software since I was 13 years old. The internet helped raise me, kept me employed, and taught me a lot about the world through its glowing pixel displays.

In my late twenties I did a lot of growing up in the outside world, and that growth made me question the work I had been doing behind the screens.

I had doubts about WordPress as a project. Then AI arrived and I had doubts about my worth. The skill that had made me special my whole life had been commoditized overnight, and I was standing on the beach watching the tidal wave approach.

Despite these doubts, the work on MD never stopped, whether through code or grand plans. Creating this work has been my lifelong safe space, and going quiet about it was a real mistake.

A product you don’t hear about is a product you stop trusting, and I understand if that’s where you landed.

Marketers Delight 6.0 is the answer I came up with for all of those doubts, built with conviction for the present and future of websites.

The model around MD has changed too: the core theme is free and open, and new features ship as Drop-ins instead of waiting on one giant release. It no longer depends on just me to keep moving.

Your website should be your oasis

The web is a different place than it was the last time a new version of MD was released.

When anything can be generated from a prompt, the things that aren’t generated start to matter more. We use the internet to hear from other people, to teach, learn, and entertain, and that is the part worth protecting.

Social media amplified that for independent publishers, then threatened it. AI looks like it’s delivering the final blow. So what’s the point of owning your own website anymore?

I think the answer is what it’s always been: a platform of your own that you can shape in ways you can’t on somebody else’s foundation. Not just a profile, but a place that makes you feel good to publish.

Own your content, keep an archive of your work you can look back on years later, and get out of the doomscrolling mindset and into the publisher’s mindset. The more of yourself you install into your website, the better it does, naturally, and sometimes immeasurably.

WordPress is still the best way to do this. It has stayed open source and accessible for over 20 years, gives you total code and customization ownership, and emphasizes websites built and operated by humans.

Sure, you can have AI generate a static site for you, and it feels great at first. But point your agents at a WordPress site and what they leave behind is still dynamic, fully editable, and yours. That’s the dream.

The problem with WordPress is also its greatest strength: the plugin ecosystem. To make it do much of anything, you bolt on plugins from multiple sources, learn each one’s way of doing things, and then fight the slowdown they cause on the frontend and in the admin.

Marketers Delight 6.0 exists to solve that. A feature-rich website that loads fast front to back, is easy to maintain, and becomes a place you love publishing to and a destination your readers want to come back to.

What is Marketers Delight 6.0?

The short version:

Marketers Delight turns WordPress into the best version of itself.

To get a little more technical: MD is a full content operating system. It supports everything from micro to longform content, knows about all the different types of content you publish, and wraps it all into a smart web design framework.

The WordPress theme market has spent a decade trying to solve the infinite web design problem, and the page builder market is an arms race over who can stuff the most controls and soulless templates into your website and call it value.

It’s no wonder WordPress takes so much heat: the big business around it treats your website more like Photoshop than a content publishing platform and marketing machine.

Marketers Delight takes a different approach, and it’s been the same since the first release in 2011: do more with less. Build features that feel native to the platform so they stay out of your way, and give you the most for the least effort.

The parts you will notice first:

• Block Editor and Classic Editor: MD works in the editor you already use. If you have been avoiding the Block Editor for years, you can keep avoiding it. If you have moved on, every MD design tool works there too.
• Post types and categories: fully customized. Podcasts, courses, recipes, docs, whatever you publish. Each post type gets its own layout, loop, and byline, and each category page gets a proper header instead of a bare list.
• Magic Loops: Set how your posts display once and every archive, category, and post type inherits it. Your front page builds itself from the content you already have.
• Header and Byline Builder: Drag menus, links, buttons, and search into place around your logo, per device. Arrange author, dates, categories, and share buttons per post type instead of fighting a template.
• Category pages that act like content pages: This is the piece WordPress has been missing for over 20 years. A category in MD gets a cover, a description, its own layout and sidebar, and sections of its own, so it reads like a page you wrote instead of an incomplete list. Build one for every topic you cover and you have a site that ranks and reads well without a single SEO plugin.
• Drop-ins: New features that install like part of the theme, not another plugin. There are 27 and counting: Stream for short-form updates, Bookshelf for what you are reading, Table of Contents, Optins, Share, Glossary, and more.

The core MD theme is free. Install it on as many sites as you like, starting today. A license gets you the premium Drop-ins, early access to new versions, and one-click updates delivered straight to your sites. When you want more, the pricing page has the plans.

Already an MD customer? Log in to your account to check your status and download all the new releases.

How to upgrade to MD6.0

If you’ve had a website faithfully running on an older version of Marketers Delight over the years, there isn’t a smooth upgrade process yet, so treat upgrading like a small project.

Your posts, media, and content carry over untouched when you install MD6.0. What doesn’t: some global settings, which you’ll re-enter, and your Drop-ins, which you’ll reinstall. That’s site-level work, not something you have to go update across thousands of posts manually.

Use some of that time to learn the new settings and get your pages back in order.

An offer to early adopters

I’m not asking you to do the upgrade yourself. I want to reconnect with you and help you move to MD6.0 personally. If you’ve moved away from MD, or never ran it, I’d be thrilled to help you move in.

For the first 10 sites that want to move to MD6.0, I will do the work for you.

We go through your site together in a free work session, I handle the migration, and you get a site built on the new system with someone who knows every corner of it.

In return, I get to see exactly where the upgrade path breaks, and I turn that into automations for everyone who comes after.

If you’d rather do it yourself, the MD support forums are open and I’m in them every day.

Want in? Message me on the forums with your site URL and I’ll reply within a day.

So, what’s next?

I am more thrilled than ever to be back in the driver’s seat here. My first love on the internet has always been publishing, and in search of the perfect place to do it, I became a developer.

Now that MD6.0 is out, you will start hearing from me a lot more through blog posts, stream posts, and documentation. Shipping new Drop-ins will always be the fun part, but building the philosophy and helping you realize your own website is what I care about most moving forward.

I am delighted that you have read this far and I can’t wait to see what you build with MD6.0. It’s great to be back.

Want to start working with me on your site? Message me on the forums with your site URL and I’ll reply within a day.