Marketers Delight 5.3.1 Adds New Developer Tools, Settings Fields, and Unlocks WordPress User Meta

Today MD5.3.1 further matures as a rich developer’s platform by unleashing the MD custom fields API to the WordPress user profile screens, and adds powerful new settings fields for instant use in new Drop-ins and custom child themes.

The Power of a Platform Lies in the Hands of its Developer’s

Since opening the Drop-ins library, we have been on fire in the MD Labs brainstorming and creating new drop-ins that can add all kinds of different features to your websites.

We believe so much in Marketers Delight as a strong foundation to any WordPress website that we’ve opened the entire developer library used to build these features, and the core features, to every MD user.

These tools aren’t just “yet another settings API” but part of the entire theme system that makes up your website that wastes nothing and can be built on top of infinitely, in a seriously performant way.

With our recent push to help developer’s get more out of MD we are seeing better, longer-lasting, and easier to update websites being created in a way that can be distributed to any website using MD.

This is a huge deal, but what’s even more is the caliber of plugins we have been able to replace with MD’s brilliantly simple developer tools.

While we appreciate the contributions and flexibility of a tool like Advanced Custom Fields, the additional interfaces, database queries, and questionable data formatting adds unneeded dependencies to your development toolkit and makes websites work harder for results that should come at multiple fractions of the cost of implementation.

Over the past weeks a handful of MD client sites have been able to move away from ACF and rely solely on some of the developer tools I am about to walk you through below, and others documented in our Developer docs.

But enough boasting, shall we see what MD5.3.1 adds to your developer’s toolkit? 😀

Create custom user profile fields with full access to WordPress User Meta

Since its inception, MD has offered easy ways to create custom admin settings, custom meta boxes, and custom term meta.

Now in MD’s push for WordPress domination, you can extend the user profile screen and add custom settings fields that any author can edit from the Edit profile screen.

By having access to the Edit profile screen you can now create personalized author settings in your projects and attach more specific data about your author’s to posts, pages, and other post types.

But it doesn’t stop there—the question now is what kind of data can you now capture from the user profile screen?

After all, creating the right user settings is not only about typing text into an input field, sometimes you need more dynamic settings like checkboxes, select boxes, radio boxes, etc.

But with the dynamic nature of WordPress, we can capture even more advanced data, and MD5.3.1 adds two new powerful fields to your arsenal that can make your client’s lives even more convenient.

Introducing the New Editor and Term Select Fields

MD comes with many custom settings fields and up to this point included:

1. Text input
2. Number input
3. Range slide
4. URL input
5. Textarea
6. Code area
7. Checkboxes
8. Select boxes
9. Radio select
10. Color picker
11. Image upload
12. File upload
13. Group/clone fields
14. Editor field
15. Term select field

Now that’s a lot of fields! MD5.3.1 introduces the last two on the list, the Editor and Term select fields.

For examples of what some of these custom settings can look like, refer to the example admin page the Drop-ins Generator creates for you:

Editor Field

The Editor field is basically what we now know as the “Classic Editor” but now available for use in custom settings screens, including the Edit Profile screen.

By calling the Editor field in your admin settings, user’s can create formatted content with bold, italic, underline, font styles, images, and more, all captures in a simple settings call.

Term Select Field

When working on sites with a lot of content, it can be useful to give client’s the ability to choose content based on categories.

The new Term select field generates a list of terms (categories) that can be quickly selected by your client based on any taxonomy you as the developer choose, and can be elegantly accessed in your custom projects.

A Public Service Announcement to All MD Developers

I hope you’ve enjoyed this breakdown of what is now possible with developer tools in MD5.3.1.

The curious of you may have noticed there are no code examples in this post, and that’s because we are working on expanding this information in our Developer Docs.

(You can also work from the examples in the Drop-ins Generator)

There isn’t a framework more fun to build on than Marketers Delight, and we are aggressively seeking to expand this platform into one of the biggest movements in WordPress.

That’s why I am calling all MD developer’s (maybe literally) and asking anybody to reach out if you have interest in receiving personal training on using MD development tools to build more robust WordPress .

If this interests you, please contact Alex via email or send a message at the MD Forums for more details.

We are building the next generation of WordPress developer’s who want to use one of the smartest (some say the smartest) tools to make more money and deliver better results to clients.