My Question To You

How many times have you built a great looking site that loads fast, works perfect, and the user after you destroys the layout or load time due to large image file sizes? Or, have you ever designed a beatiful image slider layout with great looking rounded corners, but the client did not have the resources or knowledge to create images that matched the orginal work? Well if you have experienced this and use ExpressionEngine, you're in luck!

Your Image Handling Dream Come True

Aaron Waldon from Caung Effect has created an extremely useful and powerful plugin for ExpressionEngine that will solve your basic image handling needs and much, much more. You can read the plugin docs to get a full understanding of how useful this product is, but I will cover two of my favorite features here.

My first and favorite feature—although not the most powerful part of the plugin—is the ability to round image corners without using image editing software or a javascript solution. I love when we have a design that uses rounded corners effectively, but after I fall in love with the look and feel, I come to find out that the end user will not be adding these little accents to the final product due to their lack of know how.

Secondly, CE Image easy allows you to scale down and crop images to fit whatever size area you have to fill with a simple tag and a few parameters. With the code below you can round the corners by 4px and scale and crop the image to 200px by 200px:

{exp:ce_img:single src="{custom_file_field}" max_width="200" max_height="20" crop="yes|center,center|0,0" rounded_corners="all,4"}

All for $8, the CE Image plugin solves a serious site usabilty issue for developers and the end users in a simple, straight-forward way. What a great deal!

You can find this plugin at devot-ee or the developer's site. I recommend you check it out.

1 Comment

Aaron Waldon

April 02, 2011

Thanks for the favorable article Stevan! The plugin was born from my desire to push the limits of image manipulation in EE (mixed in with a lot of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” features).

I like that the plugin is affording you more opportunities in your design choices, because you know that the image effects can remain consistent even after the site is turned over to your client. It is rewarding for me as the developer to see that the plugin is “a dream come true” for you and your clients.

Thanks again for the review and the great introduction to the CE Image plugin!