Marketers Delight 5.5 Special Summer Updates

Working strongly through the summer months, I am happy to unveil the sun-blasted and red-hot MD5.5 is now available for update in your WordPress dashboard! Let’s explore the new features below.

Header Improvements

What started out as a few minor tweaks turned into a much larger project as MD5.5 features some much-needed improvements to the header area of every Marketers Delight powered website.

The changes to the header are mostly aimed at improving site navigation, in which the first thing you will notice is the new multi-level dropdown menus on mobile.

Instead of listing a long, hard to follow list of nested links to show parent and child menu hierarchy, MD now uses a clever menu toggle script to make sub menus accessible only when clicked on by your site users.

Go ahead and try it on this very website, or at the MD demo website.

Another part of designing a proper navigation experience is context, and when to show certain links to certain users of your site.

As more MD powered websites are used for membership and course websites, it can be valuable to show a set of header links to members that are different from every other site visitors.

Now when you visit WP admin > Appearance > Menus you will see a new menu location that can be set to show for logged-in users only. Simply create a new list of menu links and assign it to this new menu location.

Despite the new functionality and styling of this header area, your site’s stylesheet and scripts files have gotten smaller and more organized.

On the subject of scripts—often one of the most difficult parts of website optimization—let’s take a look at how MD5.5 innovates the not-so-simple task of loading scripts throughout your website:

A Built-in Package Manager: Introducing MD Dynamic JavaScript

By powering your websites with Marketers Delight you unleash a suite of power features like popups, floating bars, share buttons, and a growing list of Drop-ins carefully designed to extend your website even further.

Since MD is boldly designed to handle all of these website power features, you get many benefits that are lost and in fact become problematic when patching multiple plugins together to get the same functionality.

There are reasons why caching and script minify plugins are so popular: websites need a way to make plugins that were designed without each other in mind to work together without harming site performance.

As an intentionally designed ecosystem, MD has always been fairly smart about loading the JavaScript that powers your site’s important features.

But, there was always an important detail missing from the equation that most, if not all other WordPress products suffer from too.

All functionality—from popups down to the mobile toggle menu—were neatly compiled to the tiny scripts.js library as a static file that loads to (almost) every page of your website.

But what happens when you don’t use a header menu or don’t care for popups?

Due to the static nature of this file, your site would always load the JavaScript for these features even when not needed.

This has been forgivable thanks to the already tiny JavaScript footprint, but MD5.5 fixes this oversight by custom compiling your site’s scripts.js file based on only the features you have enabled.

No header menu? No header menu scripts.

Created a popup in MD > Optins > Popups? Load the popup scripts.

Don’t want any share buttons? Uninstall MD Share and you lose the dead weight.

Err, still with me?

Just file this one as an “under-the-hood” enhancement, and know the drop-ins we continue to release will be better built to keep your website a content producing machine for a lifetime.

Faster Admin Navigation

One of the themes of MD5.5 is easier navigation, and that also extends to the MD admin dashboard. After you update you may notice the “Site Design” tab has been removed and merged with the main Settings view:

Why? Simply put, the scope of what these admin pages will offer are evolving past just “site design” and it has always felt cumbersome to click through two pages to reach these controls.

Furthermore, you may notice various tweaks and adjustments made throughout the Colors, Typography, and other settings pages. These admin pages will continued to be developed upon with fun new enhancements.

Powerful New Drop-ins on the Horizon

Finally, Marketers Delight 5.5 is the opening act to some powerful new Drop-ins that have been carefully developed over the summer months.

Alongside MD5.5, a slew of existing Drop-ins have received maintenance upgrades and can be easily updated from the MD admin dashboard.

Drop-in Upgrades

The following drop-ins have been updated alongside the release of MD5.5:

• Share 1.0.2
• Optins 1.0.4
• WooCommerce 1.0.3
• Footnotes 1.0.2
• Admin Bar 1.1.2
• Beacon Menu 1.0.2

All upgrades, including MD5.5, are available as one-click updates from the MD admin dashboard to all licensed customers.