10 Ruby On Rails Plugins You Should Be Using
One of Ruby on Rails strengths is how easy it is to extend with Ruby Gems and plugins, becuase you don’t have to code everything yourself you can save a lot of time. One problem facing Rails codes is knowing what plugins are out there and how to use them. The following is a list of 10 plugins that should make your coding life much easier and save you a fair bit of time.
- attachment_fu - Anyone dealing with file uploads, especially images, should take a look at this plugin, it’s a replacement for acts_as_attachment. The plugin is easily configurable and supports storing uploaded files in the file system, database, or on Amazons S3 service. It also supports 3 image manipulation libraries for resizing and altering your uploaded images, Image Science, Mini Magick, and Rmagick.
- acts_as_taggable_on_steroids - Tag clouds are not particularly easy to code when you are first starting out. This plugin handles all of the heavy lifting for you including adding and removing tags and even tag cloud calculations.
- minus_r - If you are not keen on the prototype javascript library and want to use alternative libraries without replacing the default rails javascript helpers or want to write real javascript in your rjs templates this plugin is for you.
- acts_as_ferret - Powerful search plugin that fuilds on the ferret gem for enabling full text searching in your applications. Ferret is a port of Apache’s Lucene and enables fast powerful searches with very little code.
- white_list - Is essential for any site that allows users to input html to be displayed, this plugin lets you filter out bad HTML tags and attributes to strip out unwanted code and reduce the risk of XSS attacks.
- acts_as_ordered - This plugin provides an easy way to find a records neighbours, great if you want to provide previous and next buttons on your site.
- BlueCloth/RedCloth - These two are actually gems and convert markdown and textile syntax into HTML markup.
- Rspec - All the cool kids are using it these days, why not jump on the fashion bandwagon too? Seriously though, Rspec is a way of specifying how your application “should” behave and then testing it actually “does” what it should.
- autotest - This makes testing a breeze, it keeps track of which files you are working on and automatically runs the tests for the file when you save them. When you hook this into growl you can get popup notifications that tell you if your tests passed or failed. Now you can concentrate on coding and forget about remembering to run your tests, works with Rspec and rails built in unit test.
- restful_authentication - This replacement for act_as_authenticated offers easy site authentication in a box.
- acts_as_rateable - OK we lied, this is the 11th plugin lets call this one a freebie. Add a ratings system to any model, very simple to use neat little plugin.
We hope you found this list useful, try them out and let us know what you think of them. Of course all of the plugins are fully compatible with our Ruby on Rails hosting packages.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Not to toot my own horn, but I have made a new plugin based on acts_as_taggable_on_steroids that allows for custom tagging contexts…just providing the link in case anyone could use it.
http://www.intridea.com/2007/12/4/announcing-acts_as_taggable_on
December 11th, 2007 at 1:25 am
[...] 10 Ruby On Rails Plugins You Should Be Using (tags: ruby rails programming) [...]
December 12th, 2007 at 11:43 am
[...] 10 Ruby on Rails Plugins You Should Be Using is an article that pretty much covers what it says in the title. The author looks at ten different useful Rails plugins and gives a reason for their inclusion in the list. Amongst the ten are attachment_fu, white_list, Rspec and autotest. [...]
December 12th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I missed the acts_as_statemachine plugin! Its really helpfullto handle state and leads you to nice meta-programmed models.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Thanks!
But, are they 10 (”10 Ruby On Rails Plugins You Should Be Using”), 12 (”The following is a list of 12 plugins”) or 11 (the actual number of plugins listed? ;)
December 12th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
there’s one plugin called acts-as-rated (http://rubyforge.org/projects/acts-as-rated) which does the exact same thing as acts_as_rateable… Is there any real difference between them?
December 12th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Is the minus_r/minus_mor plugin relevant now we have .js.erb template extensions?
December 12th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Two plugins I’d include in the list:
scope_out: helps create custom finders based on conditions, ordering, etc, with minimal amount of effort
will_paginate: the new school way of paginating
I only discovered these recently, but I can’t imagine going back.
December 12th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I wanted to plug PragDave’s plugin
annotate_models: puts your table’s schema information at the top of each of your corresponding models. Really great if you’re editor has inline text-complete!
December 12th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Good spot paketep, I have changed the number to 10 :)
December 13th, 2007 at 1:31 am
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December 13th, 2007 at 7:23 am
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December 13th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Personally, I find Shoulda ( http://thoughtbot.com/projects/shoulda ) to be as useful as rspec and much more friendly to my project. It doesn’t break Test::Unit, it produces output that IDEs can grok, … RSpec has been a breath of fresh air, but I find Shoulda gets me just about as far without getting in my way nearly as much.
Just another plugin to be aware of.
December 14th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I just wanted to second that will_paginate should be on this list. The pagination helper was removed from Rails 2.0 and will_paginate seems to be becoming the new standard unless you want to roll your own or use the deprecated classic_pagination.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:52 am
I have a doubt regarding general process of installation of plugins. When we install a plugin, is it just that the plugin files get copied to vendor/plugins/ directory or there are other changes too.
I am unable to install the Fforum plugin from svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/fforum/trunk
However, I have access to the svn. So I tried copy pasting the plugin into /vendor/plugins/ folder. Still, I faced various problems. I am guess thats not the way to do it. Can anyone guide me on this please?
May 20th, 2008 at 5:02 am
You should install plugins using the command:
./script/plugin install [plugin_url]
Each plugin will have its own initialisation script that is run on install, if you just copy the files the plugins initialisation script will not be run so you will probably have issues. I have no experience with the fforum plugin so I suggest you visit the fforum site for more information.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
shameless self-plug:
I never leave home without the ability to write queries without the :conditions tag
http://code.google.com/p/ruby-roger-useful-functions/wiki/EnglishLikeQueries