When it comes to web development, I particularly like the Coda application (made by Panic Software) which does just about everything I need as a web developer. However, there are a few plugins that I rely on that make my life much easier and help me work faster in Coda. I want to share this list of five plugins with you. The best part is that these plugins are all free.
Coda PHP & Web Toolkit
First of all, the Coda PHP & Web Toolkit give me some proper validation features. The plugin offers PHP syntax validation that jumps to the error and auto-saves. It also offers to clean up and reformat both CSS, HTML, Javascript and PHP in a way that you can personally configure, which I think is pretty neat. Furthermore, it will minify your Javascript and CSS as well as validate them as well.
CSS Tools
CSS Tools does two things that are needed now and then, most often just to save some space. Firstly, the plugin lets you compress your CSS files, removing extra space. There are two modes for this, one high compression and one medium compression, with the latter leaving more spaces than the former.
Secondly, it beautifully reformats a stylesheet written in a multi-line syntax into a single-line one and vice versa. This is especially useful when I want to send a stylesheet that I have written to another designer who fancies the single-line syntax, or when I get one in single-line and want to work on it in my favorite formatting way.
Emcoda
What Emcoda does for you is turn email addresses into protected ones that are harder for a spam bot to grab, using a javascript code. This is a very specific use-case, but is sometimes a brilliant way of showing your actual email address, properly formatted online.
WordPress Mode
Here is my absolute favorite Coda plugin. The majority of the projects that I work on will at one stage or the other be turned into WordPress templates. WordPress Mode adds autocompletion for WordPress functions and template tags to make the coding go much faster. It does indeed since you don’t have to go looking in the mighty WordPress Codex to see if the function was spelt in one way or the other: You get it inside of Coda.