Why Won't My TS4 Mods Work?????

Two days ago I downloaded TS4 on my laptop. I used to use my boyfriends (we both have HP laptops) but I've been getting more into mods lately and didn't want to take up all of his space, so we dusted off mine, made sure it was functional and downloaded TS4 with all of my additional packs. Today we got an external hard drive because the game itself took up 90% of my storage. I've been downloading mods and saving them onto my external hard drive but they're not showing up in game (which is also on my external hard drive). I've enabled, disabled, re-enabled, repaired, uninstalled, re-installed, cleared my caches, rebooted my laptop entirely and nothing will work. Every mod I've tried has been created in the last 5 months and is created specifically for TS4. Is this because of the newborn update? Has anyone else had this issue? This is also my first time using the EA app instead of Origin, does that have something to do with it?