Customizing Craft: Essential Craft Plugins

Part of this customization has been building our own custom plugins, which we have shared with the Craft CMS community. Below is a curated list of plugins, including our custom built ones and others from the community that we install as default on all of our Craft sites.

Deployment

Craft Boost
We set up all of our websites to have three environments: dev, staging and production. The dev environment is for development, the staging environment for testing and the production environment for the live website. We built the Boost plugin to deploy code changes across all three environments and keep them all in sync.

Search

Craft Google Custom Search
Craft comes with search functionality built in, but we often end up setting up our clients with Google Custom Search. We built a Google Custom Search Craft plugin to integrate with Google's API and display Google search results right on the client's website.

Rerouting

Craft Reroute
When we create a new site for our clients, the resulting URL structure normally differs from their previous website. We don't want to lose SEO with their previous links turning into 404s, so we end up installing the Reroute plugin which allows you to control redirects right in the Craft admin panel. We can permanently redirect old, broken links to a page on the new website, keeping all the SEO juice they have built up over time. We are looking into switching over to the Retour plugin, which includes regex redirects, which allows us to redirect multiple links with one redirect rule.

Sass

Craft Sass
We've used Sass on all of our websites for several years now. We built a Sass Craft plugin that allows you to upload a Sass file to the server which the plugin will compile into a CSS file on the fly. The plugin uses the Leafo Sass compiler to perform the compilation, which also handles caching, making it quick and easy to add Sass to your website without having to compile locally first.

Custom Field Types

Fields
Craft comes with many field types built in, but the Fields plugin created by Barrel Strength Design includes a few other very helpful field types, including email addresses, links and phone numbers.

Social

Craft Social
Many of the sites we build for our clients have social components integrated directly into the site. We built the Social plugin to give us an easy way to integrate Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds right into the website.

Starting off a fresh Craft install with all these plugins gives you a powerful, customized CMS that will rival any product out there.