Marketers Delight 5.3.2 Maintenance Release and Drop-in Enhancements

Marketers Delight 5.3.2 is now available for download and comes with a long list of enhancements, bug fixes, and general improvements around the MD ecosystem.

You can update your sites with the one-click updater from Appearance > Themes or download the latest MD + Drop-ins from your account area.

Following the recent MD.com redesign and move to Kolakube support, this first new update keeps things pretty light by focusing on improving the vast feature set of MD and catches up with the development of the fast-moving Block Editor in WordPress.

This is also the first MD release that involves updates to Drop-ins which can easily be managed from the Drop-ins Manager in your admin panel.

Before I dive into some of the new features and changes I want to extend a big “Thank you!” to those of you who took the time to write up bug reports and make feature suggestions at the Kolakube support forums.

Myself and the MD team are always monitoring the forums to get a sense of what you are most interested in seeing next and if anything is not working as expected, so know you can always contact us there for any ideas you have that can improve Marketers Delight.

Now, let’s take a look at what you can expect from MD5.3.2!

Catching up with Gutenberg

The “Gutenberg” Block Editor in WordPress is being developed at a fast pace and MD5.3.2 plays catch up by updating some of the typography, colors, spacing, and other styles to meet the editor’s new standards.

While I have plenty of criticisms about how expansive the editor has become in WordPress, I for the most part enjoy writing blog posts with it and love to see the words I write mirror perfectly to my final, published articles.

The one place I do not agree with seeing the Block Editor is on the Widgets screen, where the WordPress core team found it to be a good idea to replace the classic look with a slow, bloated, and unnecessary Blocks version.

It seems I’m not the only one who dislikes the Widgets blocks editor screen as the Classic Widgets plugin, which disables the block features, has well over 500,000+ installs.

After installing this plugin to just a few of my websites I was already getting tired of it! Now in MD5.3.2 you can quickly disable the Block editor widgets screen from the MD Site Tools panel:

I felt a temptation to enable this setting by default, but I will let you make that decision for yourself. In addition to this backtrack enhancement, MD5.3.2 improves the Block Editor in numerous ways:

• NEW: Adds support for Page Break block and adds pagination when splitting posts into parts
• Updates spacing, font sizes, shadows, and other minor typography adjustments
• Now changes the Editor background if body/content box set to dark color. Adapts for MD’s box/minimal style layout
• Ensures inline styles print to Block editor if option enabled in MD > Settings > Site Tools
• Fixes warning message on Block Editor page for custom block registration
• Shows proper shadows on image captions

All in all, with MD5.3.2 your Block editing writing experience will be the best you’ve had yet!

Enhancements to the Stream, Docs, MD Admin Bar, and others

MD5.3.2 also comes with updates to 6 Drop-ins. If you use the following Drop-ins on your site, you’ll want to update them from the Drop-ins Manager after your site is on MD5.3.2:

• Admin Bar 1.1.1
• Beacon Menu 1.0.1
• Docs 1.1.2
• Optins 1.0.2
• Related Posts 1.1.1
• Stream 1.0.1

While most of the changes are trivial, there are a few solid new features in the Stream, Docs, and Admin Bar. Let’s go through them quickly below:

Auto-post new content with Stream Activity

There is a new feature in the Stream settings page called Stream Activity which will auto-post newly published content to your Stream page when enabled.

Write a new blog post? Publish a new doc? Defined a new glossary term? Your stream can now be auto-updated when you press the publish button:

Stream Activity supports a bunch of custom post types and integrates with other MD Drop-ins, so you can fine-tune which content auto-posts on publish. Think of the Stream as your site’s very own retweet valet:

Call the Docs Drop-in Whatever You Want!

Thanks to a great discussion at Kolakube support (MD customers only), we figured out how to rename the Docs Drop-in to any wording we wanted.

As you can see from our own MD Docs section this layout can be re-imagined for many different purposes so it was only right to offer a couple of new settings to make updating the wording easy for you.

Personalize your MD Admin Bar with Link Presets

The MD Admin Bar is a humble yet important Drop-in for speed fanatics such as myself who are tired of being penalized for logging into my site with slow performance from the WordPress admin bar.

Once enabled, the MD Admin Bar replaces the WP Admin bar with a lightweight version with the same core links you’d come to expect from this area, as well as a blank canvas to design your own admin navigation experience.

It can be tedious to copy the many admin links you want to access from this Admin bar, so this Drop-in update adds a list of preset links to the builder you can quickly set and name to populate your own Admin bar:

MD5.3.2 is waiting for you in your WP admin dashboard

MD5.3.2 is the first update since the major refresh to the Kolakube + MD network, and the perfect setup for even more exciting features coming down the line.

What do you think of the direction of Marketers Delight? How can we better help you reach your goals with your business? What is keeping you away from writing consistently? Let us know in the comments below.