I am new to rails so go easy. I have two tables that I am trying to work with here, 'post' and 'category'.
The 'post' table includes the following columns, title:string content:text category:string. The 'category' table simply contains name:string.
The idea is that the client can manage the categories and also when adding a new post, they can select from a drop down that references their categories.
What is the best way to accomplish this?
You might want to model the category differently. The usual approach is to create a PostCategory model and controller, and use a relation from posts to PostCategory. Read up on belongs_to and the other rails associations before you get much further into this project. When you're ready to continue, take a look at formtastic, it makes handling the forms for the associations much easier to code
flyfishr64 is right, the "correct" way to do this would be to put the categories in their own model/table.
There's lots of helpers like collection_select that will take your list of categories (PostCategory.all) and make a dropdown list for you with the appropriate name to save it in a specific field.
That said, you could pull a distinct list of the entries in that column already and use that for your dropdown, but it's a lot more hassle than just making a model for the category.