MWG 1.1.0-beta released to Pro

Have you ever had one of those days where everything just seemed to “go right?” from a development standpoint, that was the way this weekend happened.  The installer, the gizmos, even the bug fixes just seemed to flow together  to create the lastest release of MWG.  And now I’m so excited I can’t sleep … so here I am writing this post :->

I’ve just released the 1.1.0 beta to customers of the Marketing Website Generator. This is the most exciting release to date, and will be the standard for building out over the next few months.

In addition to core bug fixes, we’ve spent time “hooking in” to the core software.  What this means is that we now have the capability to extend the software to do really cool stuff ….

I really do wish you could have been here toshare the excitement. When Sybil sent over some Javascript code she had been fighting with (the html editor kept “eating” the script), and asked if I could turn it into a Gizmo … 10 minutes later she was clicking “install from URL” from the new 1.1.0 MWG admin, and it JUST WORKED.

MWG Now has Gizmos!

What the heck is a Gizmo? You’ve seen wordpres pluginss, joomla plugins, Google gadgets, modules, mambots and lots of other extension names. Think of a Gizmo as  “plugin on steroids”, and you’ll be close.

MWG is a different animal, and has needs that are different from most of those other platforms, which, without lots of work, frankly aren’t very good at helping you to make money.

And since so many people are spreading mis-information about “plugins”, well, we came up with something a little different.

The birth of a Gizmo ….

A Gizmo is the way you that you add functionality to the MWG site. It gives programmers full access to the  underlying object and event models, allowing for both ‘displayable’ and ‘behind the scenes’ changes to the page (if you care, we’re moving to a request-response model in the code).

That’s some tech-ese for ‘a Gizmo let’s us do really cool stuff’.

For example … change the title, description, and keywords of any page, verify with Google and Yahoo!, and add google analytics code to all your pages  – all from a single Gizmo (The Webmasters Power Gizmo will be released tomorrow).

The fact that you, the website owner, can do all this just by installing an extension and not touching ANY code, is just really cool.

We have a tiny Gizmo that puts date javascript into a page, and some larger gizmos for ads and video.

Speaking of “installation”, that’s the other major improvement to 1.1. Now, instead of FTP’ing files up to your server, just enter the URL of any properly packaged Gizmo, Component or Theme, and you have it installed. Instant. No fuss.

Oh, and I did some cosmetic adjustments .. we’re done with the Butterfly blue, and on to some green!  The master back-end template is  in a single file plus some CSS, so  the colors and layout can easily be adjusted, andwe can do things like add menu items without touching the template.

Bottom line, this is the platform we can build upon. And the next few days are going to be exciting.