Plugins

Under Plugins you can view all of the installed plugins and see which are active and inactive, view version details, also update to the latest version from this panel.

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Updates

Updates to the CMS and plugins is currently managed through the GitLab repository and we should not try to manage them through the WP admin interface.  However, you can activate and deactivate plugins through the WP admin interface.

Plugin Details

Required for Basic Functionality

The site will break or basic editing functions will be disabled if these plugins are deactivated.

ACF and ACF Extensions

• Advanced Custom Fields PRO
  Enables most of the page editing fields, including all page template-specific fields and some specialized options fields, like the Sitewide Alert and Footer Content settings.

• Advanced Custom Fields: Flexible Link
  Custom plugin written by Jesse that allows you to create links that can be local pages, external links, or email addresses (default is only one of those)

• Advanced Custom Fields: Icon Picker
  Enables the icon picker interface on page edit screens

• Advanced Custom Fields: Monolith Field Types
  Includes a small collection of field types that were custom-built by NewCity to streamline the template-building process and make content editing more intuitive

• Advanced Custom Fields: Table Field
  Enables the table editor found in the Table slab on Standard Content pages

Other

• Shortcake (Shortcode UI) and NewCity Custom Shortcodes
  These two plugins work together to enable the custom inline media, inline script, and pullquote shortcodes and their editing interfaces

• NewCity Custom WYSIWYG Tools
  Defines the toolbars available on various WYSIWYG editor fields across the page editor

Important but potentially replaceable

• Classic Editor and Classic Editor Addon
  When Wordpress 5.0 is released in late 2018, the current WYSIWYG editor will be replaced with the new “Gutenberg” editor. These addons ensure that the site will continue to operate in its current form after that update.

• Disable Comments
  Comments are a potential vector for malware attacks. Your site does not use comments, but Wordpress keeps the door open for them by default. This plugin closes that door. If you ever have a need to use the Wordpress commenting system in the future, you may disable or remove this plugin—though the recommended approach would be to use the plugin’s settings to enable specific uses rather than enable comments globally.

• Duplicate Post
  Lets you duplicate pages from the page listing or from within a single page’s edit screen. A basic feature that Wordpress does not include by default.

• Gravity Forms (requires license key)
  Your chosen form builder plugin. The design of this site is agnostic as to what form builder you use, so you could potentially swap it out in the future.

• Nested Pages
  Replaces the default page listing with an improved interface that lets you drag and drop pages to change their position in the hierarchy or their order within the list. Without this plugin, the process of nesting pages is very cumbersome.

• WP Media Folder
  Lets you sort media in the Wordpress media library into folders for easier navigation. Completely optional, but quite useful. This is the same plugin used by CSU SOURCE to organize their photos.

• WP RSS Aggregator
  This is the RSS aggregator plugin you chose for importing RSS into your site.

• WP Mail SMTP
  The default mail server(s) used by managed hosting like WPEngine can be unreliable. Because they service so many different clients, sometimes they can get flagged as a source of spam, which will cause email notifications from your site to its users to get sent to spam folders or blocked entirely. Plugins like this one allow you replace the default mail server with a custom SMTP account of your own. There are other, similar plugins that could potentially replace this if it doesn’t work for some reason, which is why it is under the “potentially replaceable” category.

Primarily Used During Development

• Clear Cache for Timber
  “Timber” is the templating engine that enables the Twig templates used by this theme, and it has its own cache separate from the main Wordpress cache. It needs to be cleared whenever a Twig template file is modified, which happens often during development but rarely after the site become stable.
  Recommendation: Leave it installed but deactivated, activating when you need to modify template files.

• Debug Bar
  Provides a dashboard of useful information about the page to logged-in users, including any PHP or JavaScript errors being generated by the page.
  Recommendation: Leave it installed but deactivated, activate if you encounter errors that you need to troubleshoot.

• Timber Debug Bar
  Adds a formatted dump of the page’s Timber $context variable to the Debug Bar dashboard.
  Recommendation: Remove after launch. Reinstall on the Dev server if needed for some reason.

• Frontback
  NewCity’s feedback tool (creates the “Feedback” tab at the bottom of the browser window)
  Recommendation: Remove once post-launch maintenance window is over. It is safe to leave it activated even after launch because only logged-in users will be able to see the tab.