The latest notes & site activity from the MD Labs.
There have been a few moments of surrealism the last week of finally being able to pull the trigger on the true release of version 6.0, and the refreshed Marketers Delight website.
Maybe none as crazy as hooking back up the Drop-in updates system and watching development changes turn into live updates in my website’s dashboards.
MD is so back.
It’s a little nerve wracking to sit here and write something that’s not in a code editor or chat window after many years, but here we are, shaking the dust off and finally publishing the first post on Marketers Delight 6.0.
Marketers Delight 5.5.8 is now released. This minor update addresses some compatibility updates with the recent new version of WordPress, and will restore full functionality to the Callout, Content Upgrade, Email Form, and Share Notice blocks.
To get the one-click updates for your MD Theme and Drop-ins, go to WP admin > Marketers Delight > Updates to update from your dashboard. You can update the MD theme and drop-ins from this panel:
Thank you to Gaurav Tiwari for the bug report.
You are now testing an early concept of MD5.6, which adds some useful new features throughout the MD admin panel. Attached is a screenshot of one of the most fun part of the new version, which is the new header layout settings. More details and release coming very soon!
The new drop-in is almost ready! You will find it enabled on a few posts and pages around here, but the usage on a long article like the behemoth MD5.0 announcement post.
Dusted off my old HTML table skills and designed a custom newsletter template for issues of the Kolakube Labs. Stay tuned, and remember you saw it here first. 😉
The Marketers Delight 5.5.5 maintenance and developer release is now awaiting you in your MD dashboard! To update, make sure you have an active license key connected to your website and customer account to receive easy one-click updates and access to the latest release.
To see what’s included in the full update, including drop-in updates, read the MD changelogs: Each drop-in update is only applicable to drop-ins you have installed to your website(s).
It turns out that after upgrading to Easy Digital Downloads 3.0, a couple of important pages on the MD.com website started to load very slowly. No issues had surfaced for some days, but a small detail had started to pile up.
A performance headache, the MD account area has been loading much slower lately. It is a highly customized page (only available to MD customers) that neatly lists all direct downloads of the MD theme and drop-ins.
Thanks to the EDD developer’s foresight, a helpful clue left behind held the next clue for what to do should you see a “performance hit” after upgrading:
The main motivation behind this change was speed. Working with the legacy
EDD_Paymentobject (and associatededd_get_payment()andedd_get_users_purchases()functions) is a performance hit. We have to navigate through multiple backwards compatibility layers to build up that object.
Oh, look, the exact functions used to design our custom account area are now even slower!
After some late night digging I rewrote an important part of the account area that relied on the now old standards. With some adjustments, the newly optimized data formats of EDD3.0 are now streaming through the MD account area!
A nice upgrade, and at no effort to you.
Don’t forget to periodically check for updates in the MD dashboard, as we are on a faster development cycle of smaller updates. The MD Dashboard makes it as easy as one-click to update MD and any drop-ins as we release them. Save time, and have fun with new improvements to your websites!
Tip: Always update the MD theme (see below) before updating any drop-ins.
The MD changelog has gotten a makeover. You can now browse changelog entries by categories, including sorting all Drop-ins separate from the main MD theme.
Go take a look at the new Changelog, and follow this stream page for publish activity and other development notes.
Making some dev updates to MD.com live tonight. If you’ve been paying attention, what looks different around here? Please assume any glitches that may show up are signs of immense progress.