Following on from my previous article, here are some more packages that I find really useful and use in the majority of my Umbraco builds.
uComponents
No list would be complete without the daddy of Umbraco packages, the package so good that half of it's features got snaffled up into the core, uComponents! Written by Lee Kelleher and his band of mad scientists, this essential package contains a ton of useful DataTypes, XSLT extensions and assorted other goodies. I can't actually remember the last time I set up an Umbraco site without installing this package. To find out more about the package, you can check out it's rather impressive documentation. You can download the package from here.
AttackMonkey Custom Menus
This is one of mine. I've worked on a few sites where users would do things they weren't supposed to, like delete important pages like the site contact form, or in one case, the entire site settings section. I originally used to have some code in each site I built, but that was a massive pain in the arse, so I made a version of my code that could be managed via a config file. If you install the package, it allows you to configure completely custom menus for tree items (media or content), by either DocType or by Node ID. You can also configure it to just remove specific menu items. It's really quick and easy to set up, and it's been pretty useful on some of the larger more complex sites that I've built. I'm currenlty in the process of updating this bad boy for v7. Download the package here.
ImageGen
This is a handy package that was made by the awesome Mr Doug Robar, the chap who does the level 1 UK Umbraco training, who is also one of the nicest guys in the Umbraco community. It comes in two flavours, a free version and a pro version that you can unlock by buying a license. The package gives you a way of resizing and caching images to use on your site, so that you dont have to get the client to upload images in multiple sizes. They can just upload the largest version, and then you can use ImageGen to resize for the smaller versions. The free version does most of the things you might want, but the pro version has a lot of handy features, like the ability to crop images, watermark them and add text to them (useful for adding copyright notices etc). The pro version of the cost £125 at the time of writing, which is very reasonable! The cool thing is that you can use ImageGen in non-Umbraco sites too! To find out more about this package, check out the ImageGen website.
Media Icons
This is a realy simple package, but it really adds a lot of value for the actual CMS users in my opinion. What does it do? It simply swaps out the rather boring default media library icon for files ones that reflect the file extension on the file in the library. It ships with icons for most common file formats, such as:
- doc/docx
- flv
- mov
- ppt/pptx
- swf
- txt
- xls/xslx
- zip
It's dead easy to add extra icons for any other file types you might need (just save an icon image to a special folder named after the extension of the file you want to associate it with). Basically, editors can easily tell from the icon in the media tree exactly what the file type is without needing to open it. You can gran the package here.
Digibiz Advanced Media Picker
Prior to v7, the Umbraco media picker was a bit, errr, basic. That all changed when Jeroen Breuer realease the Digibiz Advanced Media Picker (or DAMP as it's often known). This package is basically a media picker ON CRACK. It adds a ton of conveniences to the media picker, as well as having the ability to integrate with the various cropping datatypes and with third party services like Pixlr. You can event restrict users to only picking specific types of media with the pickers, which can be extremely handy for stopping editors from doing something daft like selecting a PDF as a thumbnail image for a news article. This is another package that makes it onto pretty much every single Umbraco site that I build! Grab the package here.