Useful Plone add-ons - Free and Open Source.
Plone community has prepared a list of the best and most commonly used add-ons: https://paragon.plone.org/ is a good starting point for exploration of what Plone add-ons have to offer.
To browse all available Plone add-ons, head over to https://plone.org/products and https://pypi.python.org.
Here we present our list of very useful add-ons, grouped by category.
USER / GROUP MANAGEMENT
Products.PloneLDAP and plone.app.ldap
plone.app.ldap and a suite of related add-ons (LDAPMultiPlugins, LDAPUserFolder and PloneLDAP) make it easier to use LDAP connections in a Plone website. They provide PAS plugins which allow using of LDAP and Active Directory servers in a Plone site.
SEARCH
collective.solr
This is an add-on for integrating Apache Solr in Plone. Solr is based on Lucene and is the enterprise open source search engine. It powers the search of sites like Twitter, the Apple and iTunes Stores, Wikipedia, Netflix and many more. It improves Plone's search quality and performance.
eea.facetednavigation
The EEA Faceted Navigation (FacetedNav) gives you a very powerful interface to improve search within large collections of items. No programming skills are required by the website manager to configure the faceted navigation interface, configuration is done TTW. It lets you gradually select and explore different facets (metadata/properties) of the site content and narrow down you search quickly and dynamically.
PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
Products.CacheSetup and plone.app.caching
Products.CacheSetup automatically takes care of installing all the dependancies that make up the CacheFu bundle. CacheFu speeds up Plone sites transparently using a combination of memory, proxy, and browser caching. Can be used by itself or with Squid, Varnish, and/or Apache. plone.app.caching provides a Plone UI and default rules for managing HTTP response caching in Plone >= 4.
LAYOUT and STRUCTURE
Products.ContentWellPortlets
Usually, portlets show up in the left and right columns of a Plone site. This product enables you to add portlets in places other than right and left columns, such as under the global navigation, above the main heading of a page, above the footer etc.
collective.lineage
Lineage is a Plone product that allows subfolders of a Plone site to appear as autonomous Plone sites to the everyday user. This hub and spoke structure allows site administrators to easily manage multiple, seemingly independent, sub-entity websites in one Plone. Lineage can be used within a large organization to manage multiple microsites, such as school district sites, university departments, corporate product sites, public library satellites, professional association events, and more.
collective.cover
collective.cover is a package that allows the creation of elaborate covers for website homepages, especially for news portals, government sites and intranets that require more resources than a simple page or collection can offer. However, despite offering rich resources to build a cover, collective.cover also provides a very easy mechanism for managing its contents, built around a drag-and-drop interface.
GALLERIES and CAROUSELS
collective.plonetruegallery
This is a Plone product that implements a very customizable and sophisticated gallery. The gallery/slideshow can aggregate from picasa and flickr or use plone images.
collective.easyslider
The product will allow you to apply an easyslider to any page with the ability to create each slide using a WYSIWYG editor. It allows you to easily add an easySlider content rotator to any page on a plone site and provides also a slider view for Folders and Collections.
collective.carousel
An add-on for having Collections' results presented as a nice carousel. The product assumes you have a Collection which returns results that are rotated in a carousel. Several carousels per page are enabled as viewlets or portlets.
FORUMS
Products.Ploneboard
Ploneboard is an easy to use web board. It utilizes the proven Plone user interface, and is made for easy integration into Plone sites. The target audience is businesses and developers wanting a discussion board in their Plone site. PloneboardNotify adds a configurable sending e-mail service when new messages are added to Ploneboard forums.
WORKFLOW
plone.app.workflowmanager
Workflow management tool for Plone, offerring a complete through-the-web (TTW) tool for generating and visualizing custom workflows. Additionaly, you can easily add content rule actions (send email, move object etc.) for a workflow transition.
FORMS
Products.PloneFormGen
PloneFormGen is a very useful add-on for building forms through-the-web.
CONTENT/DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
collective.documentviewer
This package integrates documentcloud’s viewer and pdf processing into plone.
Solgema.fullcalendar
Solgema.fullcalendar is a complete implementation of Adam Shaw Fullcalendar into Plone. This calendar allows you to display events type objects in a powerful and fast ajax agenda. You will be also able to add, edit and more generally manage your events throught the Calendar with a strong AJAX framework.
wildcard.foldercontents
A better folder contents view for plone, with multi-upload functionality, better drag and drop implementation, shift-click selection and more. This will be the default folder view in Plone 5.
wildcard.media
This package provides Audio and Video Dexterity content types and behaviors, conversions and players/views. It integrates the HTML5 media player mediaelementjs and uses Async if installed to convert videos to common formats.
MISCELLANEOUS
collective.contentleadimage
This products allows adding a descriptive image to content in a Plone site. It has similar behaviour as Plone News Item, where you can add an image to a news item and this image is displayed in news item listing.
collective.portlet.tal
TAL Portlet provided by collective.portlet.tal, is a very simple portlet that allows the site admin to write a short chunk of HTML that includes TAL template statements. This makes it easy to build simple dynamic portlets through the web.
