Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

A few great plugins that I am using in my current Ruby on Rails project

Posted on the October 6th, 2008 under My Projects,programming,Ruby on Rails,Tutorials by

I am currently working on an interesting project for a customer of mine.   Hopefully I’ll be able to share more of the details with you all when the project is near completion.  The project involves creating events, parsing and caching RSS feeds, generating RSS feeds, as well as Emailing and SMS’ing subscribers daily events.   I have been working on the project for the last 5 days, and I am about one third of the way through.

I wanted to share some great plugins for Ruby on Rails that I have come across, along with some tutorials. Check back for an updated post with more info.

Plugins:

Restful Authentication – This widely-used plugin provides a foundation for securely managing user authentication – http://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication/tree/master

acts_as_taggable_on_steroids – This plugin is based on acts_as_taggable by DHH but includes extrassuch as tests, smarter tag assignment, and tag cloud calculations.  – http://github.com/mattetti/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids/tree/master

Paperclip – Paperclip is intended as an easy file attachment library for ActiveRecord. The intent behind it was to keep setup as easy as possible and to treat files as much like other attributes as possible. http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip/tree/master

Paperclip Polymorph – This plugin allows users of the Paperclip plugin to easily share attached files between multiple models. http://locusfoc.us/2008/6/29/paperclip-polymorph

acts_as_textiled – This simple plugin allows you to forget about constantly rendering Textile in your application. Instead, you can rest easy knowing the Textile fields you want to display as HTML will always be displayed as HTML (unless you tell your code otherwise). http://github.com/defunkt/acts_as_textiled/tree/master

Will_paginate – Pagination is just limiting the number of records displayed. Why should you let it get in your way while developing, then? This plugin makes magic happen. http://github.com/mislav/will_paginate/tree/master

Tutorials / Guides:

If you are new to Ruby on Rails be sure to check out the guides that are being worked on right now here: http://guides.rails.info/index.html

Railscasts – Free Ruby on Rails Screencasts – http://railscasts.com/

Learning Rails – Audio (Podcasts) and Screencasts – http://www.buildingwebapps.com/podcasts

Jim created a great list of plugins he found useful when he was building a social network in Rails. Check it out here: http://jimneath.org/2008/04/25/building-a-social-network-site-in-rails/

Some Linux Tutorials and How To Links

Posted on the December 25th, 2006 under Linux,Tutorials by