There is nothing I love more than the perfect tool for the job. ExpressionEngine has been the backbone of our web development for years and it has a great plugin community. Over the years we have fallen in love with a few plugins and I wanted to share them with people who may not be familiar with how much easier they can make publishing your content. Two things to note. We are right in the middle of the transition from EE2 - EE3 and some of these are plugins have not been ported to EE3 yet. This is very much an EE2 based list. Also, there are a ton of great plugins that are amazing for development (low, stache, ce cache, etc.) however I wanted to focus on plugins that are used by content managers.
Here we go.
Here are the plugins
We couldn't do what we do without assets. The ability to manage hundreds of files is a snap. Moving files in and out of subfolders for easy organization is crucial to our clients and the system would be much harder to use without it. The ability to easily upload, add and remove multiple files at once is also a huge timesaver. This one makes the ship sail.
This plugin is one that content editors don't see, but need to know about. Telling a user they need to open up photoshop to make sure the images are the right size just isn't acceptable. CE Img allows us to setup parameters which will automatically resize images perfectly so no matter how big or what size ratio the image is it looks perfect and loads quickly in the browser. It also has a lot of super cool image effects like automatically applying filters and styles.
Blocks give you flexibility to create custom page layouts quickly and efficiently. Your developer builds different content types, you select the the appropriate one, enter the content and order them as you wish. Quick, easy and scalable. Create varied and dynamic pages easily and without hassle.
The perfect "what you see is what you get" text editor for ExpressionEngine. This sucker is clean and has the perfect amount of customization to make sure you know what your type is going to look like when you hit publish. Basically it puts Microsoft Word functionality right into the management system.
When looking at a large list of content sometimes a title and entry date just isn't enough information. Zenbu / Hensu allows us to not only customize how our content lists are displayed but edit the majority of them without having to even open the entry edit screen. This one can save tons of time on simple but repetitive editing tasks.
Honorable Mentions
Assigns editor and publisher roles so some managers can submit content for other managers to approve. Also has a great preview feature.
Gives you the ability to create complex forms on the fly. This plugin is far and away the best form plugin for ExpressionEngine.
For complex recurring events that you need to display in a visual way with lots of data, look no further. If you have a lot of events this is your best bet.Not every site needs structure but the ones that do, really need it. Structures allows you to build your site out as pages and move them around, delete, create and modify at will. It's a true site builder type of plugin and for really large sites that need flexibility it's a great "go to!"
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