Practical Rails Plugins Learn how to accelerate your Rails development using plugins

The Rails framework empowers developers with unprecedented levels of productivity by embracing principles such as “convention over configuration” and “don’t repeat yourself”. This paradigm is even apparent at the community level, where developers regularly share their custom framework extensions by way of Rails’ plugins feature. Plugins offer a way for developers to extend the core Rails framework with their own custom features, allowing for rapid integration of features such as authentication, user ratings, and search.

Practical Rails Plugins shows you how to capitalize upon the wide variety of plugins at your disposal by guiding you through their integration into a number of interesting projects. You’ll learn how to rapidly augment projects involving asynchronous video transcoding, geocoding and mapping, content management, community ratings, and PDF generation. You’ll also learn how to create and distribute your own plugins.

• The ultimate guide to building powerful web sites faster using Rails plugins
• Demonstrates how to use popular plugins within a number of practical (and fully functional) projects and mini–applications
• Shows you how to create and distribute your own plugins

Introduction to Plugins for Ruby on Rails.- What are Plugins?.- Example – Imageboard/Discussion Service.- Handling User Logins with Restful Authentication.- Enforcing Privilege Separation with Authorization.- Uploading Images and Generating Thumbnails with Attachment Fu.- Easily Add Lightboxes to a Photo Site.- Paginating Resources in Forums.- Login and a News Feed Sidebars with Simple Sidebar.- Example – Recipe Swapping Social Network.- Adding OpenID Authentication as an Extra Login Option.- Build a 5-Star Ajax Rating System with Acts As Rateable (Model Enhancement).-Add Web 2.0 Tagging to your Model with Has Many Polymorphs.- Make Use of Amazon Product Data in your Models.- Catching Validation Errors with Assert Valid Markup.- Improving Overall Database Performance with SQL Session Store.- Example – MP3 Download Service and Band Showcase.-Build a Band MP3 Player with Flash Media Player.- Non-Evaling User Templates with Liquid.-Payment Processing with Active Merchant.- Using BackgrounDRb for Long-Running Tasks.-Better JSON output for Web Services and Mashups with Jsonifier.- Easily Add Tabbed Navigation.-Browser-Based Testing with Selenium On Rails.- WYSIWYG Resume Editing with FCKEditor and In-Place Controls.-Validate Your Data Using a Variety of Rails Plugins.- Quick PDF Generation using RTex.-Search Blogs and News With a Powerful Full Text Search Engine.- Internationalize your Application with Globalize.-Easily Embed CMS Capabilities with Comatose.- Example – Antique Search System.- Zero-Work Admin Interfaces with ActiveScaffold.- Version Your Store Inventory with Acts As Versioned.-Automatically Suggest Search Keywords with Acts As Suggest.- Radius-Based Location Searches with ZipCodeSearch.- Generate Bar Graphs with CSS Graphs.- Test Code Coverage with Rails RCov.-Leverage Memcache for a Performance Boost with Cache Fu.- Writing Your Own Plugins.- How to Create and Distribute a Plugin.-Common Strategies for Extending Rails With Plugins.