Tiny Craft Plugins I Love
Sometimes you need to give a shout out to the little guy. I’ve run across a few Craft CMS plugins that may not be huge, but made my life easier. Want to know what they are? Read on.
Patrol
I grabbed this plugin because I was moving both 47m and BareNeckers to https. Dreamhost and redirects are a little goofy so I wanted to bypass .htaccess and use something built-in. Patrol does a great job with this. Install it, flip the secure connections switch and you’re done. You can set specific directories to be secured if you like, too.
Patrol also simplifies maintenance mode for your site. Flip it on and set a URL or directory to show visitors while you’re working on the site. You can even authorize IP addresses to go to the full site and bypass the maintenance page.
Task Manager
If you have any kind of caching or image transforms in place you may have gotten one of those “stuck tasks” things in the sidebar. Before the best way to deal with it was to dig around in the database and remove the offenders. That’s a pain in the butt, though. This little plugin gives you an interface in the control panel to see each process, when it started and the option to restart it or kill it.
When I’m busy I appreciate plugins like this that not only simplify a needlessly complex process, but offload a tremendous amount of mental overhead when you’re in the middle of trying to write a blog post and don’t want to play tech support.
Template Select
I ran across this one when I was making a contact form on BareNeckers and wanted the page itself to be editable with my content matrix. This plugin lets you choose any of your templates from a dropdown and then you can include them on the page. Or do whatever you want to with them.
It actually opens up a lot of possibilities for re-using templates in page layouts if combined with a Matrix field. Let your imagination run wild!
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So that’s it - a tiny post for some tiny plugins. I hope they help you as much as they helped me. Do you have your own favorite tiny plugin? Let me know in the comments.
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