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Marketers Delight 4.9.4 Adds Deep WooCommerce Integration, Design Updates, Scripts Manager, and More
Marketers Delight 4.9.4 is ready for download! The main focus of today’s update is a deep WooCommerce integration that makes setting up a store with WordPress a whole lot easier.
By introducing a modular CSS system, and updates to the Scripts Manager, MD4.9.4 is better than ever at serving only the most relevant scripts and styles to keep any given page as lightweight as possible.
Like with all major updates, MD4.9.4 adds just as much as it takes away.
To keep adding new features and capabilities into Marketers Delight comes with the responsibility to grow in a way that’s best for the overall health of your website.
A big tool like WooCommerce requires a lot of work to setup—not including many performance optimizations—and there MD has improved in many ways to better design your store and keep your website fast-loading.
Now in the click of a button you can make your MD powered website fully compatible with WooCommerce.
Sites already running Marketers Delight 4.9.4
Own your store online with MD + WooCommerce
A Fully integrated store that matches your site’s design, enhanced by smart design decisions, template support, and other bonus features.
WooCommerce support is now officially part of MD! To enable this new feature, simply go to the MD > Settings > Feature Manager option and your site will transform into a fully featured store.
Apart from inserting WooCommerce templates and adding custom styles to clean up the details, MD adds many great bonus features that you won’t find anywhere else.
Click here to see shop demo (opens in new window)
With perfect compatibility into MD’s template system you can take advantage of features like custom sidebars, layout options, and even keep perfect harmony with the fonts, colors, and other elements you set from the Site Designer.
Marketers Delight even takes your store’s design by further by cleaning up “missed” details in WooCommerce’s default design and even spices up the add to cart button:
To make your store more engaging to use, add a shopping cart icon to the header from the MD bonus features. The cool thing about this cart icon is that it stays up to date as people add and remove items from their cart.
There’s even more I can introduce here, so why not go see the store features for yourself? The new MD Demo site has a preview of the shop archive, product pages, checkout, and the account pages for you to see for yourself.
You can now enjoy your very own store attached to your blog and being selling your products faster than ever. As the web reawakens to the importance of platform ownership, you will already have setup your own store with MD and WooCommerce.
With new Integrations comes great responsibility
Keeping MD clean with new CSS Templates, a more flexible header, and optimizing scripts one page at a time.
Introducing a massive feature like WooCommerce challenged the efficiency standards of the MD design system, and with adjustments, MD4.9.4 takes a more modular approach to loading your website.
A theme with as many features as Marketers Delight tends to load very slowly because of how much code and external scripts are required to make them work.
Because MD is built for high efficiency, the insane amount of features don’t slow down your websites in a meaningful way. A lot of that is thanks to the commitment of keeping scripts and styles down to the fewest possible.
That’s why MD loads only one stylesheet and one scripts file for all of its custom made features, and smartly activates them on a page by page basis.
Even still, not all of the scripts and style code in those files are always needed so MD’s newly revised CSS system makes sure to never load the styles of features you aren’t using from the Features Manager.
Adding a store to your website adds thousands of lines of code that can be a huge performance hit by its own merit, and especially to the rest of your website’s pages.
Just as MD keeps WooCommerce’s impact on your site minimal, those of you who don’t even use the plugin will have no trace of its code or features in view thanks to the improvements made to the CSS system and Features Manager in MD4.9.4.
Reworking these things to best accommodate WooCommerce helped me upgrade many ways MD loads its own features, and even got me thinking about future features that are on the whiteboard todo list here in the MD Labs.
1. A more flexible header
The header is an important part of your website and can be utilized far more effectively. MD4.9.4 sets the stage for future functionality by restructuring the markup and simplifying the styles required to keep everything in place.
If you have written any custom CSS or updated header template files in your child theme, watch out for any conflicts with the new header markup and your old changes. The changelog has a clearer picture of what has been changed.
Enjoy better vertical alignment, spacing, and some minor Site Design details fixed in the new header. Watch for future updates as MD continues to enhance the header.
2. Modular CSS Templates
MD takes a next-level approach to handling your theme’s styles with a new feature called CSS Templates. Now when you are writing CSS in a template file you can call the values of custom settings from the Site Designer, and other logic.
The benefit here is that as colors and other design settings change from the Site Designer, the new style.css file your site prints will reflect that new color.
That means in your custom CSS instead of manually typing the same hex color code to different elements, instead use a function to always pull the color right from the user’s settings.
The entire MD stylesheet has been rewritten to support this new template system, and wow, the possibilities for future integrations has never looked better!
I understand this may sound crazy, but I am incredibly excited at how much more efficient CSS now loads on your site and what it means for future development.
Are you interested in using CSS Templates in your child theme and want to learn more about potential uses? Leave a comment on this post and let me know and I will make some tutorials!
3. Manage Plugin Scripts From the Post Editor
Part of what makes Plugin optimization so frustrating is limiting which scripts and styles are loaded around your website. To ensure maximum compatibility, most Plugins simply load their scripts and styles on every page on your site.
But ask yourself, does a page that doesn’t have a contact form need to load those scripts and styles?
Does a page that doesn’t belong to your store need to load those scripts too?
No, of course not!
To help address this issue, the new MD Scripts Manager offers a path that can help you make a dramatic difference in your page load time.
By adding your favorite Plugins into the new md_filter_dequeue_scripts filter, you can create a simple admin setting in the post editor that will allow you to remove all of those register scripts and styles on a page by page basis.
That means you can better optimize your most important landing pages for speed by configuring your favorite Plugins into the filter and then removing the scripts and styles from those pages you know the Plugin is not used on.
As of writing, MD only supports WooCommerce out of the box, which adds this extremely useful removal setting to the end of the Scripts Manager:
Just like WooCommerce, other Plugins that use the WordPress enqueue system can be added here with ease. Read the following guide on how to use the new md_filter_dequeue_scripts filter on your own site:
The future of MD is bright
Upgrade Your Site to Marketers Delight 4.9.4 Now, and Get Ready for the Wild Summer of MD
If you’ve been following the chatter and the growing MD support forums you already have an idea of the big things coming to Marketers Delight over the summer.
Expect a fun summer of releases including the long-awaited MD Optins, a special update to the Bookshelf and merging of the MD Video Gallery, as well as finally taking on the page builder market with MD’s own Builder tool.
You can also expect some new content from myself and some guest writers, as well as new videos soon to be posted to the MD YouTube channel. I will alert you as that feature is finally set up; I have been excited to talk to you a lot more closely.
For now, MD4.9.4 is waiting for you in your WordPress dashboard and all you have to do get it is click the one-click updater! Updates are only sent to sites with an active license key, and if its past time to renew your license key I have some good news…
Until MONDAY, JUNE 17 2019 I am offering an 18% discount code to celebrate the acquisition of MD.com. If you’ve been waiting to renew until MD got WooCommerce support, now is you time to finally get those features AND save money!
I really like the one page checkout design used on the Marketer Delight website which is shown when you click the add to cart button on the pricing page: https://marketersdelight.com/pricing/
The way woocommerce is designed out of the box is not conducive for those of us that offer a single product or sell subscription services. However, the single page checkout design you created is ideal. Is this included in the latest version of MD?
Thanks for the feedback. I custom made the checkout page you see on MD and that is for the ecommerce system I use here called Easy Digital Downloads. I have been wanting to release the template forever, it just needs some cleanup work.
In case you didn’t see it, MD adds a feature called “Minimal checkout” which removes a bunch of checkout fields that a store selling digital products may not need. This will make your checkout page as thin as the one you see on the demo site.
Also, you can disable the “add to cart” functionality and set your buy buttons to go straight to checkout (Woocommerce settings) which will remove some of the friction I believe you are talking about.