Publish Status Updates, Threads, and Share Posts With the New Stream in MD4.8.4

The time it takes to produce quality content and quickly post short updates are in conflict with one another. So how can we combine the brevity of social media and longform content together? Introducing the Stream…

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Add a Familiarly New Kind of Blogging to Your WordPress Site

The Stream is a new feature in Marketers Delight that lets you quickly post status updates in a micro stream. You can use it to quickly post streams of thought, keep a news story up-to-date, update goal logs, write changelogs to your courses/products —all kinds of things!

Click here to see preview!

Key features:

• Organize streams in a timeline template and break into pages
• Post status updates and share content from any post type on your site
• Display images in lightbox for quick viewing
• Add Threads to any status to create a long stream of thought
• Organize streams into categories and create unique stream content pages
• Simple interface that keeps everything out of your way so you can just publish.
• …and more coming soon!

Since the idea for came to me, I’ve been using it on this very site to document my progress and have a lot of fun writing out statuses. It’s cool to be able to use my WordPress site as my own personal feed.

These days as the Internet shrinks around us it’s more important than ever to have a strong home base if you care to put yourself out there.

WordPress and MD means owning your own content, so bring the same power of fast communication to your website and never worry about anyone looking over your shoulder.

And now you finally have a damn edit button.

How to Get the Stream on Your Site:

The Stream is now available in MD4.8.4 and ready for use on your site right now! To update, make sure you have your active license key enabled then go to WP Admin > Appearance to update Marketers Delight to the latest version.

I’ve chosen to include the Stream in the MD core as it is an important feature that stands to be a powerful way for you to create new kinds of addicting content on your own website. Because of this, it will be easy to send you new features and improvements to the Stream as they’re ready.

To activate the Stream after you update, go to the newly redesigned MD admin panel and enable the Stream from the Features Manager.

Afterwards, resave your permalinks in Settings > Permalinks and you can begin using the Stream!

See What Else is New in MD4.8.4

As you already saw, the new MD admin panel has been redesigned for simplicity’s sake and to move the most important settings right under your fingertips.

You can enable your license key, access the features manager, embed scripts, and use other MD’s power features like Popups and Share from the brand new MD admin menu in your dashboard:

For the longest time I had kept the MD settings link hidden underneath the “Appearance” menu as a way to be polite and not contribute to the WP admin panel getting cluttered.

As the years of MD development kept going, the power and reach MD is able to have over your site is too big to continue hiding.

You can now access MD’s settings pages easily from the new admin menu, and I do encourage you to watch this space in your admin over the next few months as MD continues growing.

The Popups interface has also been slightly designed so you can more easily find your Popup Hotspots and Main Popup settings:

…and many under-the-hood changes were made to make MD even more efficient at loading backend scripts, checking the status of your license keys, and other cleanups.

A Note About Caching…

MD4.8.4 now includes a way to always make sure the latest version of your stylesheets are showing by placing a new cache-busting query string at the end of your CSS file.

Now, each time a stylesheet in MD changes, a string is added to the end of the URL in your source code with the date the file was last changed.

This will allow cache plugins to see if that version of your stylesheet has been loaded yet and whether to reload the new styles or keep the cached version at an older date.

I mention this because many of you have had issues with cache in the past, and this solution will now make this problem largely go away (thanks to Galen Gidman and Chris Pearson for bringing it up recently on Twitter).

To read the full changelog of MD4.8.8, check out the full listing on The Stream!

See the MD4.8.4 changelog →

Look Around, There’s Something Big in the Works…

If you’ve been watching the last couple of weeks, the Marketers Delight website has been going through a huge overhaul. The front page has been redesigned to better represent the features and ideas bestowed in MD to your website.

While not everything is done (not even close!), part of rethinking my strategy around here has led me to the idea of the Stream, and something even bigger with the experimental MD Labs.

You’ll understand more as I continue building MD and writing (and streaming!) more here at the site.

But if you’re reading this, then the first phase of the opening of the MD Labs has been successfully executed.

Enjoy the Stream.