Top ten suggested add-ons?

Question

Hypothetically...What would be the top ten add-ons for site that is like this?

Lets say they want a blog, be able to change the header sliders on several pages and control the image galleries, suggestions?

More specifically, which ones would be best in regard to security,sustainability and reliability as the site ages?

Answer 1

It depends if you're giving it to a client and if there's going to be much in the way of CMS functionality.

Looking at that template, I really can't see any need for as many as 10 addons. The only addon I'd say was worthwhile is Freeform, which handles form submissions nicely.

If giving it to a client, the ones I use most often are:

• [CE Image] for image manipulation.
• [SEO Lite] which just adds a meta title/description/keywords field (though this is not necessary and could be done through regular fields and a little logic).
• [Structure] which gives a nice UI to your pages which makes it much easier for a client to use and also helps with generating menus, sitemaps etc. (although again, this could be achieved with the standard EE [Pages][5] module but Structure is far easier for clients to understand in my opinion).
• [WYGWAM] which is just a rich text editor (again, not necessary as the standard EE one would be fine but WYGWAM is nicer to use).

These are mostly professionally maintained and updated regularly.

EE isn't really like something like Wordpress where you'd chuck in say, an image slider plugin. The best thing about EE is that it is so simple to pull data out of it that you'd just find a javascript slider and use EE to get the images out with something like:

<section class="header-gallery">
    {header_images limit="4"}
        <img src="{header_images:image}">
    {/header_images}
</section>

Answer 2

For the sliders and galleries, i'd recommend - grid/matrix with Ansel - or Channel Images (combined with native resizing) - and CE Image for better caching/compression control

Other top addons i'd use: - Wygwam - Structure - Stash - Low Variables - Freeform Pro - Minimee

Answer 3

It sounds like you're approaching EE from a WordPress background(?). You don't need any add-ons to build a site like that. The fewer add-ons you can use, the better, as they each introduce avoidable dependencies.

If you're concerned about "security, sustainability and reliability" then don't use any add-ons.