Category Archives: Gems and Plugins

This is the place to discuss different Ruby and Rails gems and plugins; how to install them, use them, and modify them; as well as how to write your own gems and plugins.

Bort: Better Skeleton Applications

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Ashiq Alibhai

bort is a replacement for your standard Rails application skeleton. It comes with Restful Authentication, Will Paginate, code for using a MySQL database, database sessions, and more! Use it instead (it won’t hurt you), and it’ll help you bootstrap your Rails applications even faster (and in a better way)! Continue reading →

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Extending Acts_as_Authenticated

Posted on July 13, 2008 by Ashiq Alibhai

acts_as_authenticated is a pretty sweet plugin for managing users. But extending it proves to be a bit of a challenge. In this article, we discuss two approaches: adding methods and fields to the existing User class, and subclassing User. Subclassing separates the code from the core User code. We use single table inheritance to achieve this lofty goal. Continue reading →

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Foxy Fixtures Explained

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Ashiq Alibhai

Rails integrated a plugin called Foxy Fixtures into the core API. How does it work? It allows you to refer to other fixtures by name, instead of by ID (so no more hard-coded IDs). But there’s a gotcha–the IDs are generated automatically, so they’re not 1 or 2 like you might expect (for your first and second fixtures). Continue reading →

Posted in Gems and Plugins, Testing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Acts_as_Authenticated Plugin

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Ashiq Alibhai

Rails doesn’t come with a built-in login/user mechanism. Acts_as_authenticated is a Rails plugin you can use to get user functionality for free. It allows users to register and sign-up, and provides a means for you to restrict certain pages to users who are logged in only. The plugin is relatively simple to install, and easy to use. Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Gems and Plugins | Tagged | 1 Comment