For those of you not familiar with Essentials it is probably one of the longest running plugins for Bukkit in existence. It was created within the first few weeks that Bukkit was available and it offers many useful features to users such as teleporting, warping, spawn control, chest protection, coloured signs, customised nicknames, muting players, kicking, banning, help menu, afk status, mail sending, inventory clearing, server pinging, chat formatting. And well the list goes on and on.
So why are we using it? Simply put, it has become very reliable and updated fast when new Bukkit versions are released. This means when 1.3 launches soon we will be able to update much faster and with less annoying plugin incompatibilities. Already I have transitioned from ChatManager, TeleportSuite, plgWarp and Simpletime to Essentials. During next week even more plugins we use will be removed and transitioned over to essentials as-well and I'm hopeful we can eliminate a good 10 plugins in total just by switching to Essentials.
Now the obvious question is, why didn't we do this before? Well as you know I've been running this Minecraft community for two years and at one time we did infact use Essentials but back then it was pretty lousy. It would often override other plugins commands and cause all kinds of conflicts. That is why we stopped using it originally but over the past year they have improved the plugin significantly and I feel it would be silly of us not to use it now, it will solve a whole host of headaches and most importantly get us on the latest minecraft versions as soon as possible.
Right now in game you can see a few new features already that we are using from essentials.
- Admins/Mods can now Mute players when they start raging in chat.
- All players have a mailbox (use /mail to view) which lets you send messages to other players which they will receive the next time they log in to the server.
- There are automatic AFK notifications when a player goes AFK (you can also use this manually by typing /afk)
- You can now ping the server in the event you think your connection has messed up (use /ping)
- Admins/Mods can now set custom nicknames for themselves and other players upon request
- You can message other players in-game by using /msg <name> instead of /tell <name> now
Thanks for reading.
