Add-Ons To Enhance The Performance Of Expression Engine (EE)
Expression Engine (EE) is one of the toughest competitors to other CMS like Joomla, WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and others.
But, what makes EE so special?
You don’t want your website to be limited to publishing or sharing content. You want it to be a system, a platform that offers more than just content viewing and sharing, not just a blogging tool. And that is what makes EE special!
Take A Look At The Below Reasons That Make EE A Favorable Choice For The Website
- Even though the development team of EE is small, they are hyperactive, and they offer considerable help through forums, blogs, and other documentation.
- The plug-ins and modules offered by EE come with source code, and if you are aware of PHP or MySQL, you will do just fine. EE supports Javascript, HTML, and CSS also.
- The control panel of EE is very innovative, and it lets you control things from the browser itself. Manage pages or do customization using such panels.
- EE is very secure; it offers IP banning and anti-spamming methods. Despite that, a lot of developers come to EE when developing a big website, compared to smaller ones; because they are cynical about EE not being a good option for developing small websites.
As mentioned above, ExpressionEngine add-ons, extensions, and plug-ins are the primary reasons for the CMS’ vast popularity.
Let’s Take A Look At Some Of Them, And See How They Make Ee More Functional
FREEFORM (Paid)
Freeform is used for every site developed in EE. The contact forms developed in EE are weak, so such add-ons can add the required functionality and create custom fields, templates and stored in the database to be accessed when needed.
CHANNEL IMAGES (Paid)
The image uploader of EE is decent, but it might be complicated for the end-user. It shows the HTML code, and the user has to modify it, and many things can go wrong if the user is not experienced. So, such a plug-in would let the user upload any image and FILE will take care of the HTML code in the templates. For blogs, where multiple images are required in the body, it might not work but works great in any other application.
CE Image (Paid)
With this plug-in, the user can upload the file, change it, and crop it multiple times with one simple tag. The CSS cropping only offers cropping from the edge of the image. This plug-in would automatically create a new image based on the parameters. All the user has to do is specify the width and scale it down as per required. And the best part is that you can scale it anywhere on the image. With the file extension combination, the user can post everything in one place, keeping the gallery untouched.
Smart Export Pro(Paid)
Smart Export plugin is mainly created to export the channel entries with Grid and Relationships fields without writing any code or SQL query.
Editor(Paid)
With other WYSIWYG’s for ExpressionEngine, you can easily get confused about where opening and closing tags are. It becomes easy for a novice content administrator to garble tags and mess up layouts. With Editor’s Visual Mode, you can easily see separations of closing tags and build complex pages with ease.
Smart Members PRO (Paid)
Smart members PRO is created to fulfil the most common member related problems of EE. You can now Export and/or Import members, Can log in with normal username-password method or can log in with more than 20 social media login integration methods. Moreover, One can create their Custom fields with Multi select, Radio buttons, Select Dropdown and File fields.
Structure (Paid)
The structure is one of the most powerful add-ons that lets you create pages, generate navigation, manage content through a simple interface, and build robust sites faster than ever.
SEO Lite(Free)
We create a website to impose our virtual presence by acing the SEO practices. Just WordPress has Yoast for SEO-related processes of a website, ExpressionEngine has SEOLite. It is a free add-on that is lightweight and allows you to add meta descriptions and title tag to your content for better SEO results.
Link: https://devot-ee.com/add-ons/seolite
If Admin need Extra Open Graph tags then install this paid Plugin
Wrapping Up
Through this blog, we have seen the basic yet important add-ons that we must employ to an ExpressionEngine website to enable smooth functioning. ExpressionEngine has grown to compete with all the prominent CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, etc., in a very short span. There are various reasons for its growth, but the most obvious of all is its simplicity and efficiency. The community started as a handful of people, and today it stands on a pedestal where it hosts global events to raise awareness and impart knowledge about ExpressionEngine and its subsidiaries.
Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.
