As Craft CMS is becoming more popular, you’ll be happy to learn there are many more plugins now available for this platform. The growing list of plugins includes those for simple field utilities, full ecommerce solutions, and more.
Craft decided early on to go with a licensing plugin model. This means that paid Craft plugins charge an initial licence fee and then a reduced annual fee for plugin updates. The fees ensure that developers receive compensation for the maintenance of their plugins, which means the plugins are updated more frequently.
Choosing the right plugins for your site depends on the type of site you’re creating and your goals for the site. In this article, we’ve put together a list of plugins that can be used on just about any type of site! These are some of the best Craft plugins available!
What is Craft CMS?
Before we go on, we’ll take a quick look at what Craft CMS is and what’s making it so popular! Craft CMS was developed by Pixel & Tonic. The platform is an alternative to WordPress and is specifically aimed at publishers who want deeper control and more performance for managing their content.
Craft is not a site builder, which means you’ll still need to build your site with HTML, JavaScript, and more. Written in PHP on the Yii platform, Craft is a great choice for a small website or for larger websites that contain tons of content.
The Craft developer community is one that’s dedicated and growing quickly. This means there’s an active community to reach out to when you need help.
Craft is a feature-rich platform, which is made even more powerful through the use of its plugins.
Best Craft Plugins
OK, with that little bit of background on the Craft CMS, we’re now ready to move on to our list of some of the best Craft plugins around!
1) Sherlock
While Craft has been built with great security, it still has some vulnerabilities that are noticeable when using 3rd party code. To get around this, Sherlock is a security scanner that works to keep your site secure.
Sherlock uses different tasks to check for security vulnerabilities from 3rd party scripts and checking directory permissions. This is a paid plugin.
2) SEOMatic
SEOMatic is an SEO solution that most Craft developers use, which even includes Pixel & Tonic (the developers of this CMS). The plugin applies the latest SEO best practices and implementation for Craft CMS. It offers a powerful, comprehensive, flexible SEO solution.
Keep in mind it’s necessary to define the basics in the plugin’s settings. This means it may be necessary to create extra fields to pull data from. However, there are progress bars on the dashboard that provide an overview of the plugin’s settings and what needs to be done. This is a paid plugin.
3) Redactor
Redactor is a plugin that adds a rich text editor to Craft. This plugin has been created and maintained by Pixel & Tonic. And it’s extremely useful.
You’ll find one of the plugin’s handiest features is how easily Redactor can be customised. All you have to do is copy the settings file inside the config directory and then edit the contents to change the available editing options. It’s easy to create a field with bold or a full, rich text editor. What’s more, each Redactor filed can be set to use any of the settings files.
And you’ll be happy to know this is a free plugin.
4) Venveo Bulk Edit
Venveo Bulk Edit is a plugin that’s expressly been created to provide extended editing functionality for Craft entries, categories, assets, users, and products. The plugin allows you to choose any number of elements, choose the fields you want to edit, and enter new content.
This is a great plugin to help with altering fields and sections of existing content. This is great to help save time when importing data from another platform (using FeedMe), you’re working with a client that likes to change their minds, or for a site that’s growing quickly.
You’ll save a ton of time that would otherwise be spent editing entries one at a time. What’s more, this is a free plugin for Craft CMS.
5) Retcon
Retcon is a small plugin that adds a series of Twig filters to help you modify HTML content. This is a great plugin for when you need to output content. It’s able to add classes to elements, insert attributes, modify element types, and so much more.
And you’ll be happy to know that this is another great free plugin!
6) Super Table
Super Table is a plugin for Craft CMS that makes it easy to create powerful tables. What’s more, the plugin makes it possible to use native Craft field types in your tables. These include Assets, Users, Entries, and more. This plugin also supports some third-party field types. This is also a free plugin.
Super Table’s features include:
- Nesting fields inside Matrix blocks
- Allows up to three levels of nesting with Matrix> Super Table>Matrix
- Three different layouts for flexibility: Row, Table, and Matrix
7) Retour
Retour is a Craft CMS plugin that makes it easier to redirect legacy URLs, which means you won’t have to worry about losing SEO values on these pages. This plugin resides in the dashboard side menu. If a site user triggers a 404 error, the plugin flags this, allowing you to decide how to redirect the URL in the future.
This is a great plugin if you’re working to restructure your website, change the architecture, and more. Unfortunately, this is a paid plugin.
Summing It Up
The Craft ecosystem is growing, which means you’ll find more great plugins available than ever before. The plugins we’ve shared in this post are some of the most usable for just about any type of website.
We’re sure you’ll find these are the core plugins you fall back on time and again.