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From Alex and the team.
Improving the communications of the fast-paced development from the Kolakube Labs. I’m glad to see dusting off my old HTML table skills to create a custom email template for the new newsletter format. This was a nice sight to see during the MailChimp setup process. Stay tuned!
I’m happy to put a day of big results and productivity to rest here at another late night in the Labs.
XFtoWP 1.5 RC2 was released today, and I have just finished off the night by successfully upgrading MarketersDelight.com and XFtoWP.com to the major new version without an issue.
It’s a good feeling to finally get version 1.5 to a stable and mature place as this plugin truly opens up some amazing possibilities that website owners have never truly had before.
The biggest relief of all is getting the development back on track as the plugin has been in “beta limbo” for a months, and the ideas have been stacking up! Expect some exciting new releases coming from the XFtoWP front once 1.5 is finally shipped.
In other news, have you been following the MD Changelog? Thanks to the upgrade architecture and MD’s overall maturity as a platform, development has gone full speed and updates have been easier and more reliable than ever.
There are lots of drop-ins being worked on behind the scenes and MD websites are only getting better-designed and more sophisticated as time goes on. I am excited to share with you what’s coming out of the Labs next!
Signing off for tonight,
Alex
A long and challenging night of development, but I am happy to announce it here first that the long-awaited XFtoWP 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is so close to being ready!
Looking over the homepage used for the past few months at MD.com, I just couldn’t take it anymore! After a long development session for the upcoming release of Marketers Delight 5.5, I have also taken the MD.com website back to its roots by making the blog the very front page again.
You may also notice a slightly re-organized top navigation menu that has different links based on if you are logged in or logged out.
There’s a lot to come in MD5.5 and the blog may be the best place to keep an eye out for the next features tour. Stay tuned!
A reader recently sent in:
I am actually looking forward to see some WP 6.0 and FSE-oriented updates for MD theme. I hope you have thought something about that. Because the future of WP themes are going to be different with
theme.jsonbased options and FSE.
Since the inception of the new Block Editor back in WordPress 5.0, Marketers Delight has kept up with the fast-changing pace of the Block Editor and now Full Site Editor projects.
In addition to styling the editor to match your typography preferences, MD also adds 5 useful Blocks for writers and content marketers.
We realize this Editor is here to stay and have incorporated it into our toolbox, however we don’t treat it as the “end all be all of WordPress”.
The future of MD is not dependent on this part of WordPress, and we have some brilliant tools continuing to come your way to give your site more performance and publishing power.
This may be one of the best Table of contents solutions once all is said and done. Early protoype of the design, extremely lightweight all-around in only the way MD can do it.
An upcoming MD drop-in, the way a table of contents should be! Coming soon to websites built by Marketers Delight.
The typography and layout of settings panels have always been my favorite parts of a project to design.
One of the tricky parts about these interfaces is the balance of description text and instructions. The more you have to explain, the more effort it takes to use the features.
The recently designed Bulk actions interface in XFtoWP 1.5 beta has a simple interface, but the most instructions I’ve put on a tool in a long time:
I’ll update this with some more thoughts later.
Marketers Delight 5.4.2 comes with a lot of incremental changes, including a re-organization of the Optimize WP options group in your MD dashboard.
For sites that already disabled the block-library.css file from loading to the frontend, block editor inline styles will now also be removed.
Breaking out of the labs:
The first issue of XFtoWP 1.5 beta has been declared, following 37 alpha versions to get to its first strong working copy.
Next step is to test it on a real staging/live environment. More details coming soon.
