Issue 12: Plugin-palooza March 15th 2016

Introduction

Plugin-palooza

This issue is devoted to plugins, plugins, plugins. The explosion of plugin development for Craft CMS is a sign of an active community which is good for Craft as well those of us who develop on it.

Whether you're building a plugin or looking to keep up with what's being written, I hope you enjoy the issue. And a big thanks to Craft Plus for sponsoring this issue.

Let's hit the links.

News

Craft Plugins Pro search

Fred Carlsen has taken his Algolia search experiment, mentioned in an earlier issue and formalized it with Craft Plugins Pro. Slick.

Featured Sponsor

Craft Plus

Craft Plus provides plugins, tutorials and documentation on getting started and becoming a master of Craft CMS.

Tools, tips, and fundamentals

The Basics of Craft Plug in Development

Adam McCombs from Craft Plus (hey, I know that site from somewhere!) gives the low down on building a simple Craft plugin.

Perfecting your technique

Building a polls plugin in Craft

Once you've got the basics under your belt with Adam's post, Gregor Terrill dives deeper into building a Craft plugin.

Plugged In

Label Environment

Provides colou?r-coded labels in your Craft CMS control panel to help easily distinguish between environments.

(Yes, that's an attempt at RegEx humou?r.)

HTML Cache

Generate HTML-file based caching for your Craft CMS. If you're interested in this, check out the request for static caching in the Craft core too.

Infinite Scroll

A Craft CMS plugin to enhance your paginated content.

"It's full of stars."

Direct Contents

Adds "craft.directoryContents.read("path/to/directory")" variable to templates allowing passing of a directory.

Buffer for Craft

Send social updates to Twitter, Facebook, etc. through Buffer.com via Twig templates, URLs, and plugins.

Craft Essence

What's oEmbed? It's a service that allows you to use a URL, say a YouTube link, and retrieve media data about it, like it's height, width, video URL, etc. This plugin to extract media information from URLs using OEmbed and OpenGraph.

Instablog plugin for Craft CMS

Craft is designed to be a blank slate. That means you have to create blog features every time you add a blog to a site: Tags, Categories, Search, Archive, Pagination, RSS Feed, Social Sharing, OpenGraph Meta Tags, etc.

If that bums you out, 70ktf has a solution for you.

Embedded Assets for Craft

Add embeddable media such as YouTube videos into the native Craft assets manager.

MX RangeSlider field for CraftCMS

MX RangeSlider is range fieldtype for CraftCMS which helps you to create a really nice and user friendly range select elements.

Venti

Venti is a plugin that creates and manages event & calendar entries with recurring and one-time schedules.

CraftCMS Asset Rev to aid cache-busting

A Twig extension for CraftCMS that allows you to swap out asset file names with their revved version, as defined in a JSON manifest file.

Seed an element type with dummy data in Craft

The plugin will search for all available Element Types, and gives you the option to create dummies for them. (It'll get some lorem in your ipsom.)

Craft Lettering

Lettering.js ported to Craft. Now your templates can generate the needed markup instead of relying on Javascript on your client side. Nice work.

{% filter lettering('words') %} <h1>{{ entry.title }}</h1> {% endfilter %}

Control Panel Sortable Custom Columns

Adds custom fields to sortable attributes in element indexes

VZ Address fieldtype

What can I say... VZ Address fieldtype is this fieldtype that's really focused on addresses.

Preparse-Field-Craft

Field type that parses twig when an element is saved. That sounds pretty iniquitous but check out the examples in the docs. Use Preparse "to do some bulk work when saving, like pregenerating a bunch of image transforms with Imager."

Disqus

Andrew Welch drops more goodness on us. A simple plugin for integrating Disqus into Craft CMS websites, including Single Sign On (SSO) and custom login/logout URLs.

Craft Collapse

Simple collapsible sidebar for Craft CMS.

vCard generator plugin for Craft

Craft MN IP Address:

Craft plugin which returns ip address of user so you can address them as "Mr. or Ms. 236.22.453.98".

Craft Inspector

An oldie but a goodie that "adds a helpful inspect method to your Craft templates... [to] figure out what kind of variables you are dealing with, and what methods they implement."

Task Manager for Craft CMS

Adds a "Task Manager" section to your CP to easily cancel or delete Craft Tasks.

"Out, out damn task!"

ContactForm Send Copy

This script adds a few things to the standard P&T ContactForm plugin:

Sends a copy to the submitter that can be different then the original
Allows separate reply addresses for the admin mail and the notification mail
Sets the reply address for the admin to the submitter (which is not the standard)

Audit Log Plugin for Craft CMS

Log adding/updating/deleting of categories/entries/users.

Craft User Manual

Easily create a User Manual control panel section using a default Craft section type.

Maintenance plugin for Craft CMS

The plugin provides tools to help you do maintenance on your Craft CMS website:

Display a “Maintenance in progress” overlay in the Control Panel when the site is undergoing scheduled maintenance Announce upcoming maintenance on the dashboard and with notification banners Leave your users (maintenance related) messages on the dashboard widget Access maintenance related info from your templates using the provided template variables

It’s not Craft, but it’s interesting.

Clips plugin for Redactor

We've covered Craft-specific Redactor, but this one is a generic Redactor that feels relevant. Create a dropdown of frequently used "snippets" of code, text, icons, emoji, you name it.