Which Rails plugins should I be using?

Question

Hi Stack Overflow,

I learnt rails a couple of years ago out of interest, but now I'm coming back to it because I want to try and build a simple pay-to-advertise niche job site with a few bells and whistles. Many of the rails books I learnt from gave examples of how to build a shopping cart or user authentication system, but looking around on the web there seems to be many plugins that a provide a lot of this common functionality. The choice of plugins however is very large and it's difficult for me to know which ones I should be using.

So my question is this: which (if any) rails plugins would you recommend for building a rails site, and why?

Answer 1

i recommend authlogic for authentication. the two most popular are authlogic and restful_authentication. I haven't done any shopping cart stuff but there are gems out there for integration with paypal and activemerchant.

Answer 2

There are literally tons of rails plugins (and gems) to give you the functionality you need, and I'll list some of the ones here that I've had experience with.

• Authlogic: This is a fantastic plugin. it gives you powerful authentication via before_filters on your pages, and comes without any of the weirdness that I seem to notice in Restful Auth. You can find the code here, and an example application here
• ActiveScaffold: This is great for building out an "admin interface". It's extremely powerful, and looks very nice out of the box. The only downside is the official latest release does not yet support Rails 2.3.2. You can get it here
• Paperclip: This helps you when working with file uploads in rails. It has built in support for thumbnailing (I believe you need ImageMajick), as well as Amazon S3. You can read up on it here
• SubdomainFu: While a little strange at times, it's very nice if you need subdomains in any given project. If you need that kind of functionality, feel free to grab it here

There are plenty more, but I don't have time to list them all. If you ever have need for a specific piece of functionality, always Google for it before rolling your own, because there may be a solution out there that fits your needs perfectly.

Answer 3

I recommend the following:

• thinking-sphinx: for really simple full text search using mysql database.
  
• acts_as_permalinkable for seo friendly text urls.
  
• crummy for easy breadcrumbing.
  
• delayed_job for delayed jobs, like email notification.
  
• whenever for recurring/cron jobs.