Getting PEX, WorldEdit, and Essentials to cooperate

I'm having no shortage of trouble getting permissions to work.

Here's what I want: I want WorldEdit to work for everyone, not just ops, and from Essentials I ask that it allow all users to create colored/formatted signs, and chat in colors and with all the formatting tools. Sounds simple enough, right? Well I found out from some Google searches that to get everything to work the way I want I must download PermissionsEx. So I dutifully downloaded said plugin, installed it, edited the permissions.yml with what I thought were the necessary permissions and started up the server. While according to PEX all the players had the necessary permissions to chat in colors and whatnot, it failed to work.

So what I need is for someone to explain to me what I need to do to get all the permissions to work. Attached is my permissions.yml from PEX, set up how it should be according to the internet. The plugins I have installed are Essentials, Landlord, PermissionsEx, SimplePrefix, WorldEdit, and WorldGuard.

 

For some permissions you've added a * and not all permissions have the * permission added in. Id suggest looking at this here and copy the permission.