AFAIK, applets can't be added to menu, just to panels
About adding application to menu, you can do it on System > Preferences > Main Menu

MATE 1.8 is running *fine* on my main workstation now. Love it.

Thank you, stormtracknole!
That solves a baffling mystery for me. I have a link to a folder on another drive that I mount only occasionally. Thunar doesn't see the missing link. When I mount the drive with Thunar open, the link appears with a small red x in the bottom right, meaning it is a broken link. However, it is not a broken link, I have to close and open Thunar before it treats the link as usual. Whenever I click the broken link, the entire contents of the mounted drive replaces the audacious playlist. Audacious dutifully tries to open each file and play it, filling the screen with error messages until it finds an audio file to play. I could never figure out why clicking on a broken soft link that really isn't broken in Thunar sends all those files to audacious. If audacious somehow gets to be the default file manager, that solves my mystery, for which you have earned my gratitude. I still have a quarter to buy a clue, so I'm off to examine how XFCE replaces Thunar with audacious. I have only a couple of Mate programs and their required libraries installed. I now know which sources to examine. Mate was the missing link. (I like Atril and Eye of Mate.)

First I gotta figure out where that hats-off smilie is. Until then, Hats off to stormtracknole for reporting something seemingly unrelated which turned out to help someone else solve a mystery! ... ... ...... !

Did anyone still having issues with multiple caja instances anymore? I have a separate branch called caja-fix which attempt to patch caja using upstream patch.
If the bug still present, i will merge that build to master and 14.1-mate-1.8 branch instead of waiting for 1.8.1 ( it was intended to be included as part of 1.8.1 in the future)

I had that happen to me again the other day. Not sure what I did that that triggered it though. It had not happen to me in a long time however.

I had been using the patched version and so far, i have never encountered the bug.
I will try to see if the 1.8.1 is going to be released soon enough or not. If it's still unscheduled, i'm going to release an update to caja to fix this problem.

@stormtracknole:
In the meantime, can you test it from caja-fix branch?

Sure, I can give that a try.

Is there a nice way to download the Mate build scripts and source tarballs or is the git clone method the only way? I downloaded the 1.6.1 binary packages for 14.0 (thank you all!), but the 1.8 binary packages are for 14.1 only, which means I will have to build my own packages. I am still on 14.0.

Is the new user guide a PDF? In which 1.8 package is the user guide contained?

We only support 1 Slackware release/1 Mate release. The current supported one is Slackware 14.1/Mate 1.8

For older Slackware version users will have to build it from GIT.
Please note that some packages are not yet available on 14.0, so you need to add them manually, such as dconf, itstools, and several more.

The doc guide is scattered across many packages. I don't remember precisely but you can have a look on the slackbuild script. It should contain --without-help-dir that indicates it contains the help guide.
You will need to build yelp to read the help.

The help guide will be moved to a new package in Mate 1.10.

With Mate is there a point-and-click way to switch users already logged in or are the traditional keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+Fx) the only way? I do not see anything obvious.

Unless you install a login manager such as lightdm or so, you will not be able to switch users using point and click.
But that means you will need to build it first, since it's not provided in the MSB repository

I'm running slackware current and just install mate 1.6 via slackpkgplus. Is is possible to upgrade to mate 1.8 using slackpkg plus?

I haven't really tried upgrading 1.6 -> 1.8 using slackpkg+, but i'm sure it's very possible.
The repository has been known to work well with slackpkg+, but you need to take care of the new/removed/renamed package.
Please see this for more information: http://www.slackware.org.uk/msb/14.1....8-CHANGES.TXT

I successfully upgraded using slackpkg plus and nothing broke. I'm running slackpkg install msb just to make sure I get any new packages for 1.8.

So far so good, it installed pretty quickly, but I need to gog out and back in to see what changes took place.

Just logged out and back in and all seems to be going well. Everything seems to be stable and working nicely. The upgrade from 1.6 went smoothly via slackpkg+.

Thanks for your hard work Willy & Chess. This is a nice desktop. I'm going to be using this for a while.