Essential Umbraco CMS Packages

Out of the box, Umbraco is a fantastic CMS.  It’s easy to use, feature rich and fast.  That being said, there are a few Umbraco packages (add-ons, plugins, etc …) that really bring it all together and make it just that little bit better. 

The following packages represent what I typically install or recommend on all of the projects I’ve worked on.

 

Courier - by Umbraco

Courier is an amazing deployment product.  It not only handles new development work (code changes, stylesheets, JavaScript, html, etc...), but also handles content changes.  It’s easy for content editors and admins to use, allows for publishing directly from a staging instance, as well as the full version allows the developer access to the API, command line support, and tonnes more.

It’s not a free package, like many others out there, however it’s worth the small investment.

For more details, including a full features list and pricing, check out Courier on Umbraco’s website.

 

F.A.L.M Housekeeping - by Adriano Fabri

F.A.L.M. is essential for those of us who need to keep things organized and clutter free.  This little package allows the user to easily remove those files leftover from media items that have been deleted, completely remove backoffice users, and clean up the Umbraco log events and content item versions from the database.  That last part was the clencher.

Umbraco is a great CMS, however, out of the box, it has got no way to clean out those ever growing log and content version database entries.  This free package gives the user that much needed feature, with an easy to use interface.

And once again, FREE!  Check out F.A.L.M. Housekeeping on the Umbraco site projects section.

 

uComponents - by Shannon Deminick

This was once the quintessential Umbraco package to install, but sometime in the late 4.x or early 6.x version of Umbraco, the team decided to roll in the most used DataTypes and features from the king of packages.  I’ve read they’re going to cannibalize it a bit more over the next few months, but that should only make things better for making the CMS even more feature laden.

I’d still recommend installing uComponents for a few DataTypes that haven’t made it into the CMS yet.  URL Picker, Checkbox Tree and File Picker to name a few. There’s also feature called uMapper which is part of uComponents which allows querying of nodes as strongly typed objects, a developer’s treat.  Also, free as in beer.

For a complete list of, well of everything, check out the uComponents product page. 

If you want to see what other packages are out there for the Umbraco CMS, head over to Umbraco - Projects.