My go-to Umbraco packages

Just a quick blog post about my go-to Umbraco packages that I install when setting up a new Umbraco site!

My go-to Packages

uSync

uSync is an absolute must-have, you can't do multi-environment deploys without it, hell in my opinion you can't do any deploy without it! Unless of course, you enjoy having to create/update your DocTypes after a deployment manually!

But what does uSync do? well in a nutshell it serializes your DocTypes, MediaTypes, DataTypes (and more) into XML files on disk, this means that your Git (or whatever version control system you use) will track all DocType changes, and when you deploy, uSync will use these files to update your DocTypes on that environment, neat!

Skybrud Redirects

Umbraco will automatically create re-directs if you rename, or move, a piece of content; but it doesn't let you set any up manually, and this is where Skybrud Redirects comes in! It gives you a nice dashboard to manually create, edit, and delete redirects. Almost every one of our clients asks for this functionality, and that's why this is now a standard install on all new projects.

Diplo God Mode

Another must-have, God Mode adds a bunch of super useful developer tools to the Settings section, with the most useful (in my opinion) being the ability to view the values of your App Settings, which is great for sanity-checking that you're using the correct database!

The Dashboard

The default Umbraco content section dashboard is a bit meh, it's better than what it used to be, the docs and forum links are useful, but the rest.. once you've seen it once you don't need to see it again; so The Dashboard adds a super useful new default dashboard, which shows you a list of recent activity, who edited what content, any pending content, and some stats about the site.

The dashboard is much more useful for content editors, as now, the first thing they see when they log in, is a nice brief overview of their site.

Contentment

Contentment is a brilliant package, and one I need to explore more, that adds a bunch of extra property editors to make Umbraco even better; So far I  have mainly used it for the awesome editor notes that let me add contextual information to help content editors create content.

An example of some editor notes I've created is, on media items, I usually add a note with information and links on how to write good alternative text.

Umbraco.Community.BlockPreview

The Block List/Grid are awesome, but creating previews for the blocks can be a right pain... this package essentially does that for you! It lets you use your frontend Block views and frontend styles for the block preview in the back office! 

And here are some other packages that I use quite often too

Cultiv.Hangfire

Umbraco's built-in background jobs, are nice but do leave a lot to be desired, e.g. you can't see the status of these scheduled background jobs (unless they write to the log), and you can't restart a job that has failed.

Hangfire is a really nice background task runner, that ships with a lovely UI that shows you the status of jobs, live logging, failed jobs, succeded jobs, queued jobs, and allows you to manually trigger and restart jobs! And the Cultiv.Hangfire package sets this all up for you, and even adds a dashboard, into the settings section, with the nice Hangfire UI.

If I ever need to do recurring background jobs in Umbraco, I don't bother using the built-in background jobs anymore, I instead always use this package!

OEmbed Picker Property Editor

OEmbed does exactly what it says in its name, it adds an OEmbed property editor that lets you have a nice editor for embedding stuff from sites that support the OEmbed protocol!

Media protect

The Public Access feature of Umbraco is brilliant and perfect for locking down pages to certain Member groups, but there's no out-of-the-box support for Public Access on media! And that's where Media Protect comes in, it adds this feature, and simply works really well!