ExpressionEngine Plug-ins I Can’t Live Without

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Whenever I’m building an ExpressionEngine driven site whether it’s a blog, a personal site or something corporate, there are Plug ins, Extensions and Modules I can’t live without. Here’s the beginning of a growing list.

Plug-Ins

Textile

This one allows me to use the Textile Markup Language) to use a form of shorthand to more quickly enter content. In fact, I’m using it right now to create this blog post.

Magpie RSS Parser

Probably most useful on a blog or personal site, this plug-in pulls the data from an RSS feed so that you can display it on your site with your formatting. Instead of just linking to your del.icio.us bookmarks you can display them right on your site.

Find and Replace

This one is helpful if you need to massage the content you’re working with in EE. I’ve used it to manually alter URL segment variables to convert to something URL-friendly. I’ve also used it to remove bits of HTML I didn’t want when reusing content in other areas of the site. It even supports regular expressions.

HTML Stripper

If all you really need to do is remove HTML, then this is the perfect plug-in. This one allows you to even specify tags to keep such as strong, em, etc. It’s even smart enough to strip out HTML entities.

Extensions

Solspace Tag Module

This one isn’t free, but the bang for the buck is good enough it might as well be. This single $40 plug-in gives you all the tagging functionality you could ever want in one integrated package. Highly recommended. This one comes in two parts… it’s also a module.

Edit Tab AJAX

This extension makes the view of all entries on the Edit tab sort instantly as soon as you alter a drop-down selection, instead of having you press the submit button first. This seems minor but it’s quite a time saver.

Category:

Web Design

Tagged With:

expressionengine webdev webdesign plugin

Posted By:

Ian Pitts

Posted:

06/26 at 08:17 PM

Views:

2007

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