Blueprints Add-On for Customizing Publish Page

ExpressionEngine 2 brought some great customization capabilities to the publish page, including the ability to save different publish layouts, but Brian Litzinger’s Blueprints takes that a pretty big step further.

Blueprints lets you take control of your Publish Layouts and take Member Groups out of the equation. It is designed let you create Publish Layouts based on templates, not Member Groups.

No longer will you have to tell your client “Ignore this custom field, it won’t display in Template A, but works in Template B” or, “Ignore all these templates in the drop down, just use Template B or Template C for this Channel”. Nor will you have to create different channels for different page layouts. You can create a single “Pages” channel, assign it custom fields, and use that one channel for all your page types.

Sounds pretty clean and simple, but if you watch the video on Devot:ee you will see some other nice features like enhancements to the Edit menu and having a searchable structure list in the control panel sidebar. Another feature is the ability to limit the templates that the user can select for a page, along with thumbnails for those pages. Handy!

Check out Blueprints on Devot:ee or on Brian Litzinger’s add-on site, Bold Minded.