One of Craft CMS’s greatest strengths is its collection of high-quality plugins. There may not be as many Craft CMS plugins as there are WordPress plugins, but Craft’s Plugin Store, which was introduced last year with the release of Craft CMS 3, offers a satisfying range of functionality to the already feature-rich content management system.
If you haven’t already, we urge you to spend a few minutes exploring the plugin store. In the meantime, here are five of our favorite plugins.
Feed Me
Feed Me is a content importer for Craft CMS. It can import content from many different sources, including RSS, XML, CSV, and JSON. Feed Me allows users to select field mappings for the files they want to import so that they can map arbitrary data to Craft CMS entries, categories, tags, users, and more.
Feed Me is an incredibly useful tool for developers and designers who need to get information from other sources into Craft CMS. Pixel and Tonic, the developers of Craft CMS, thought the plugin was so useful that they bought it.
CodeMirror
CodeMirror is a full-featured JavaScript code editor that can be embedded into web pages. You have seen CodeMirror in action if you have used Adobe Brackets, Bitbucket, Codepen, or the Firefox Devtools. The CodeMirror Craft CMS plugin brings CodeMirror into Craft CMS as a field type so it can be embedded into any page.
Image Optimize
Image Optimize is — as you may have guessed — a Craft CMS plugin that optimizes images. It performs lossless image optimization on several image types, including JPEG, PNG, SVG, and GIF images. Lossless optimization strips metadata and performs other optimizations that reduce the size of images without impacting their quality. The image optimizations are processed automatically.
SEOMatic
SEOMatic is the leading Craft CMS search engine optimization plugin. Like other SEO plugins, SEOMatic adds information to Craft CMS pages to help search engines understand the content. Among the metadata SEOMatic adds are Facebook Open Graph tags, enhanced sitemaps, robots.txt and humans.txt files, and HTML meta tags. SEOMatic isn’t vital to good SEO on Craft CMS sites, but it helps site owners publish content that has the best possible chance of ranking.
Splash
Splash is a helpful little plugin that provides a search interface for the Unsplash image collection within Craft CMS. Unsplash hosts thousands of high-quality images that are free to download and use with attribution. Chances are, you’re using Unsplash anyway, and the Splash plugin is a pleasant convenience for clients. As the plugin’s developers point out, Splash can “stop clients uploading bad images ever again! (Just kidding, of course they will).”
We’ve looked at five plugins of the several hundred top-notch plugins available from the Craft CMS store. If you’d like to learn more about Craft CMS and Craft CMS hosting on the Nexcess Cloud, get in touch today.
