What rails plugins are good, stable and *really* enhance your code?

Question

Anyone have a list of rails plugins that are both stable and give you enough functionality to be worth the extra effort of supporting?

Edit:

I am mostly interested in the best, most complete list of plugins so I can use it the next I'm starting a rails app. I don't currently need a particular plugin.

Answer 1

Try resource_controller. http://jamesgolick.com/2007/10/19/introducing-resource_controller-focus-on-what-makes-your-controller-special

It seriously dries up your RESTful controllers. And is the only plausible way of implementing polymorphic actions that I've come across.

Loads of other good stuff too. Give it a try.

Answer 2

restful_authentication for sign in, sign out, sign up.

paperclip for file uploads.

rspec and shoulda for testing.

Could you be more specific in what you are looking for? There are so many great plugins for so many different tasks, it's hard to guess the right ones for you.

Answer 3

You can use bort as reference

Plugins Installed

Bort comes with a few commonly used plugins installed and already setup.

RESTful Authentication

RESTful Authentication is already setup. The routes are setup, along with the mailers and observers. Forgotten password comes setup, so you don’t have to mess around setting it up with every project.

The AASM plugin comes pre-installed. RESTful Authentication is also setup to use user activation.

User Roles

Bort now comes with Role Requirement by Tim Harper. A default admin role is predefined along with a default admin user. See the migrations for the admin login details.

Open ID Authentication

Bort, as of 0.3, has Open ID integrated with RESTful Authentication. Rejoice!

Will Paginate

We use will_paginate in pretty much every project we use, so Bort comes with it pre-installed.

Rspec & Rspec-rails

You should be testing your code, so Bort comes with Rspec and Rspec-rails already installed so you’re ready to roll.

Exception Notifier

You don’t want your applications to crash and burn so Exception Notifier is already installed to let you know when everything goes to shit.

Asset Packager

Packages up your css/javascript so you’re not sending 143 files down to the user at the same time. Reduces load times and saves you bandwidth.

p/s: agree with @eric, specifics

Answer 4

I my rails time I used http://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on/tree/master with success.

Answer 5

I can imagine why you are asking that. I used to work in a project with more than 20 plugins in use. Sure, it speeded up the development early on, but later debugging became difficult. Also, updating to a new version of Rails was a lengthy process.

My advice is that don't start using a plugin before have a reasonable understanding of how it works and of the trade-offs involved. For small plugins you should probably read the source code. For larger ones, see what other people are saying about them, when the plugin was updated the last time, etc.

For scanning popular plugins, see the most popular github projects. Quite a few of them are Rails plugins.

Answer 6

For me, Haml is excellent. It's not for everyone but if it clicks with you you'll love it. Set aside 30 min and give it a shot. It reduces the clutter in my views by about 50%.

It's easy to install using Rails 2.1+'s gem dependencies :

# environment.rb
config.gem 'haml'

Then:

rake gems:install

Answer 7

Ruby Trends is a good place to check what the most popular plugins/gems/books/practices are. It's like StackOverflow (i.e., voting plugins up/down) but is more fine-grained and has the ability to search/filter.