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Manage Your Site’s Power Features With the New Drop-ins Manager (New in MD5.3 Beta)
Finally, you can try the new early release of MD5.3 on your website! This is the next evolution of building lightweight and power-packed websites with WordPress, and the star of today’s show is the powerful new Drop-ins Manager.
What is an early release?
Before any new release of Marketers Delight we run extensive tests to ensure the highest quality and safest updates are sent to your websites so you don’t have to deal with any unexpected headaches.
As requested from the MD Forums, we are opening a small window for the brave amongst you to test MD5.3 (beta) early on your own websites. This very website and some others are already running MD5.3, so you’re not going in blind and are certainly not trying out an unstable product.
That being said, we strongly recommend you make a full site backup before you update to this major new release.
Introducing the MD5.3 Drop-ins Manager
As we’ve been teasing for a couple of months now, the new Drop-ins Manager is a built-in way to add and remove site features from the WordPress dashboard quick and easy.
Drop-ins are unique feature bundles built on top of MD’s exclusive framework that can do all kinds of powerful things to extend WordPress without the bloat of Plugins.
You’ve known them as core features of Marketers Delight—the Stream, Optins, Share, and Bookshelf—and now a whole arsenal of power features you can now quickly drop-in to your websites.
Browse the Drop-ins Library
We are building an official library of Drop-ins that can be installed to any MD5.3 website.
It’s past time to make WordPress do what you want, and that’s why we’re going all in with MD’s battle-tested marketing framework and the all new Drop-ins system.
With the power of the new Drop-ins Manager comes the flexibility to custom build every site you want with the features you choose, and remove everything you don’t need.
That means less code to maintain, less scripts and styles to load on your site, and the removal of absolutely anything you don’t want to see!
Prefer to use a different share plugin over MD Pro Share? Don’t need MD’s awesome Optins modules? No problem, you can delete every trace of them from your site in the click of a button.
Want to add them back? They’re waiting for you back in the Drop-ins Library.
But that’s not all that awaits for you. Not only will you see new Drop-ins built by the MD team, but we will be featuring Drop-ins from other authors soon, and that functionality is going to quickly show the power product we’ve been building for you over the years.
But more on that later.
How to Upgrade to Marketers Delight 5.3 Beta
Until the official release you can manually upgrade your website by downloading MD5.3 beta from your account area and install it to your site by going to Appearance > Themes > Add New.
After installing MD5.3, go to the MD admin panel to see what’s new!
Now when you activate MD for the first time or upgrade from an older version, the core Drop-ins are automatically moved into the new /wp-content/md-dropins/ folder, outside of the parent theme folder.
This is a massive change in the theme architecture that will change the way your site receive updates.
Now, Drop-ins will receive their own updates through the Drop-ins Manager and the MD theme will continue to receive updates for the underlying framework and design system.
Once MD5.3 is out of beta you will be able to one-click update from the Appearance > Themes menu without uploading the .zip file.
How to Add Drop-ins to Your Site
Now that you are on MD5.3 you can immediately take advantage of the new Drop-ins Manager. We will be maintaining the new Drop-ins Library page (accessible to all licensed customers) where you can download Drop-ins at any time.
Simply visit the Drop-in page you are interested in and download the attached file, then head over to WP admin > MD > Drop-ins > Add new to upload the folder to your site!
After the Drop-in is installed you can then activate it for instant deployment to your site! No child theme code required.
Try out MD5.3 Beta Now
MD5.3 beta is waiting for you in your account area. Remember, don’t upgrade until you’ve made a full site backup. We expect the beta period to last about a week, just to give everybody a chance, before officially releasing MD5.3 to all licensed websites!
If you have any issues and suggestions, we’d love to hear your feedback at the MD Forums. Just reply to the thread below (login required) to send your feedback and get help with MD5.3.
Thank you all for your support and welcome to the new era of MD.
Not a customer yet? Click here to get started with Marketers Delight today.
