Five ExpressionEngine extensions you should not be without
Edit View AJAX
This simple extension adds instant search and filtering to the edit view page. Very simply, as you change criteria with the drop-downs, the entries below change instantly. This speeds up searching considerably, and your clients will like it too.
Download Edit View AJAX (free)
Live Search
Another no-brainer extension, Live Search gives you an AJAX search box at the top right of you control panel. Just start typing, and you’ll get search matches of weblog entries that you can click on to edit.
Download Live Search (free)
Playa
Playa creates one-to-many relationships between weblogs. This is great for so many things, I don’t know where to start. Here’s an example from a radio station web site. There are two related weblogs. The first, which we’ll call main, is for a set of pages in the web site. The second one is called promos, and contains internal promotions for the radio station. Each promotion consists of a title, a graphic, and a link.
Using Playa, you can select one or more promos to appear in a given spot on the page. In this case, the left column. To retrive the related information in a template, you use the {related_entries} tag. Playa adds functionality to Expression Engine which was sorely lacking.
Download Playa (free)
LG Better Meta
A site without meta and title tags is a site that’s hard for search engine to find, and for users to bookmark. Some Expression Engine developers have rolled their own methods for generating title and meta tags. But why spend hours doing this when an excellent extension is available to do it for you?
LG Better Meta generates title, description, keywords, robots, and various other tags for you based on the URL title of a given entry, and on meta information you enter on the entry editing page. Then you place some code in between the <head> tags of your templates, and the extension will generate everything you need.
Some Expression Engine developers are wary of paying for software, but consider how much time you’ll spend working to get the same results, versus a spending a paltry USD$40. As a bonus, the extension will auto-generate XML sitemaps, too!
Download LG Better Meta (USD$40)
LG Image Preview
Another great extension from Leevi Graham (LG), this easy-to-use addition to Expression Engine generates a thumbnail of images you’ve included in weblog entries. Why would you put images in weblog entries? Some developers like to use a weblog as a gallery, instead of using Expression Engine’s Image Gallery module. There are pros and cons to each method, but using a weblog as a gallery is more flexible in many ways.
A good example is a staff directory. You will have fields for each staff member’s name, title, department, phone, email, and a photo. When you save a new entry, LG Image Preview makes a thumbnail of the image and displays it alongside the entry’s information in the edit screen. And yes, some companies have animals on their staff.
