MD Dropins Now Available!

All MD active license key holders can now download four powerful child theme extensions from the newly released Dropins Library. I have been teasing these Dropins for a the last couple of weeks and am happy to finally have these new downloads available for you.

The first round of free Dropins available are as follows:

1. Testimonials Page
2. Page Blocks
3. Gallery Blocks
4. Related Posts

What are Dropins exactly? I have outlined just about everything you need to know, from the idea to installation in the guides below. Check out the announcement post to learn more and enjoy these new tools for your websites!

Page Blocks sneak peak

The next Dropin added to the new Dropins library is nearly ready, and just needs a little extra documentation as it is very powerful.

Once I can at least get the basic downloads pages and documentation written for the first four inital Dropins, I will do more clean up to make the Dropins Library more official, and then announce them all to the MD email list.

This Dropin is called Page Blocks, an experimental page builder I developed a while ago and polished off for this release. It allows you to build unlimited HTML sections from the post editor and works great with MD helper classes. I am excited to show this one off and even more interested to see who uses Page Blocks, as it is a tool meant for people with HTML knowledge.

Keep watching this space, lots of fun updates still ahead!

Dropins (Work in Progress)

Even though its still a work in progress, I have finally gotten the basics of the new MD Dropins Library down enough to share with the few of you who read this Stream.

Today I published four new pages on the Marketers Delight website:

1. Dropins Library
2. Testimonials Dropin (free download)
3. Dropins Installation Guide
4. How to get the Post ID in WordPress

In addition to the Testimonials Dropin there will be three other very powerful Dropins in the big release. They just need one last round of testing and for me to create the download pages for you.

Once those pages are published I will be writing a blog post and fully announcing the new Dropins library and the concepts behind Dropins to all MD customers.

Since I know only the diehard MD fans read this Stream, I thought I’d give you awesome people a very first look. Enjoy, and let’s talk about them at the forums!

Back in the Labs

Today is my first day working from the new MD Labs and I am loving it! I’ve recently made a move halfway across the country to better optimize my life to work full time on Marketers Delight at the mere cost of an intense 3 weeks of house renovation. It is satisfying to work in a house I had a hand in fixing up and that same energy will be instilled into everything you see coming next to Marketers Delight. Buckle up, we’re going to change the WordPress landscape here.

New Dropins Coming soon

In addition to the upcoming MD4.9.4 release I have a suite of new Dropins I am releasing FREE to all Marketers Delight customers. By adding these new Dropins to your child themes, you will be able to unlock some seriously powerful new functionality to your sites. Release coming soon!

MD Meets the Corporate World

I left the scaffolding of the new MD Labs to visit my first corporate level client in a local office in my new area. Being in an office full of cubicles certainly made me grateful of the freedom I have in my own work life thanks to MD and I got a taste of what it’s like to work with a full team on a large website project.

There’s only so much I can reveal about the project, and one of the interesting reasons I am being brought on is to save the project from an incompetent hire that couldn’t complete the job.

I suppose I shouldn’t call them incompetent as they managed to milk the company for multiple six-figures over the course of two years without delivering any kind of functional product.

It just goes to show you how badly skilled WordPress developers are needed and the potential for earnings there are in the space. As I gear up the MD blog, I will keep this topic in mind and share my experiences and tips to help you become a better developer and get a slice of this market cap for your own business!

Anticipation building

Tonight I have a clear head to write an update post about what’s been going on lately. About 2 weeks ago I made the decision to pack up my life (and the MD labs) and move halfway across the country into a new house.

The catch? I’m no longer in the middle of a cool and expensive city, but have moved into a “fixer up” house. Ever since moving I have been working 8-12 hours day learning how to replace sheet rock, play with wiring, paint, and all kinds of other tedious home improvement tasks.

The overlap in the kind of problem solving required for this has kept my mind sharp for coding, but the anxiousness of being away from MD has been slowly getting to me! Don’t get it confused though—this move has been entirely about Marketers Delight!

Why move the MD Labs from a cool apartment in the middle of a city to a fixer up house in the middle of an old fishing village? I am pulling myself away from the noise to put myself in a place that will finally give me the focus I need to take the capabilities of MD—and by extension your business—to the level I’ve told you we’re going in 2019.

That means I will be living more cheaply and will be able to say “no” to freelance jobs and say “yes” to MD.

The good news is we are almost done work and I am almost moved in. Until then, I will be at the MD forums helping you with your website, and will be back to the blog soon.

The Making of the New MD Labs

I have 2 big new releases for Marketers Delight coming, but first, I am rebuilding the MD Labs! Watch this space for something new soon.

The SEO Question

After nearly every feature release, somebody always asks the inevitable “how does this affect my SEO?”. I don’t laugh it off as an unimportant question, but I do wish people would be more optimistic!

SEO has many technical variables, many of which are covered by your WordPress theme (MD included). From there, the biggest factor left is to write content that people search for and would enjoy to read about. Further optimizations can then be made, like advanced schema structures and other SEO plugins.

I do not position new features in Marketers Delight as “get rich quick schemes” or “must-have features,” but I do promise to design tools that make your content more engaging.

Does Google love short form content posted on your Stream? This content may not rank, but will help your readers find content that does, and give them a new feature to enjoy coming back to on your website.

Do Callout Boxes and Content Upgrades slow down your website in order to get more email signups? NO! They are built-in to MD’s lean design system, and the same resources that build those elements already power the rest of your website.

The point blank most important factor in SEO is how high quality of a website you can produce to keep you readers coming back for more and spending more time engaged in your content.

The next time you see a new feature release in Marketers Delight and rightfully ask, “how does this affect my SEO?,” you might first want to ask “how can I use this to create better content?” to get a good answer.