# Membership Management System Plugin/Gem?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 4, 2006, 10:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805 "2006-04-04T10:35:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a5b964/32.png) [@conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/conz)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2006, 10:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805/1 "2006-04-04T10:35:31Z")

</div>

Hi, I’m looking to create an online internet community for managing  
user profiles and other data. Thus, I would need that has the  
following features:

o authentication  
- protect individual member pages/directories

o session management

o retrieve and reset passwords

In short, I’m looking to create an online community. Thus, can  
someone direct me to a plugin(s) for completing this task? Finally,  
I’m new to Rails but it seems alot easier than [ASP.Net](http://ASP.Net) being that I  
have a Unix environment to work with and Rails seems to create few  
lines of code from what I have experienced. Gotta go and thanks in  
advance.

Peace,

-Conrad

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a5b964/32.png) [@conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/conz)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2006, 1:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805/2 "2006-04-04T13:12:43Z")

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Conrad T. wrote:

> Hi, I’m looking to create an online internet community for managing  
> user profiles and other data. Thus, I would need that has the  
> following features:
> 
> o authentication  
> - protect individual member pages/directories
> 
> o session management
> 
> o retrieve and reset passwords
> 
> In short, I’m looking to create an online community. Thus, can  
> someone direct me to a plugin(s) for completing this task?

Conrad,

The auth\_generator gem is excellent from my experience.

[http://penso.info/rails/auth\_generator/](http://penso.info/rails/auth_generator/)

Though there are a number of other methods disussed on the rails wiki.

[http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Authentication](http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Authentication)

Good luck with your project.  
Cheers  
Tom

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a5b964/32.png) [@conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/conz)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2006, 2:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805/3 "2006-04-04T14:05:54Z")

</div>

Conrad T. wrote:

> Hi, I’m looking to create an online internet community for managing  
> user profiles and other data. Thus, I would need that has the  
> following features:
> 
> o authentication  
> - protect individual member pages/directories
> 
> o session management
> 
> o retrieve and reset passwords

Take a look at OpenID:

> **[OpenID - OpenID Foundation](https://openid.net)**
>
> Our mission is to lead the global community in creating identity standards that are secure, interoperable and privacy-preserving.

…and at OpenProfile:

[http://rtest.openprofile.net](http://rtest.openprofile.net)

This approach has the advantage, in potential, of letting users sign up  
for many sites with only one password/profile.

–Al Evans

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a5b964/32.png) [@conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/conz)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2006, 2:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805/4 "2006-04-04T14:39:23Z")

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Since you’re asking on a Rails list and don’t mention requirements like  
integration with other applications outside Rails, I’ll recommend you  
look at the LoginEngine/UserEngine combo from the [rails-engines.org](http://rails-engines.org)  
site. There are probably at least three or four plugins and add-on  
generators that are at least as robust, though.

As you look at things like this and AuthGenerator, ActiveRBAC and  
others, you’ll want to look through the ddocumentation and see what  
sounds good to you. Maybe more importantly since so much of this, like  
RoR itself, is new, you’ll also want to make note of how actively it’s  
being developed and maintained. For instance, Bruce P. wrote a  
pretty good plugin for this called ModelSecurity with some very nice  
hooks for controlling access down to the object attribute level, but it  
hasn’t been actively updated in a few months, thew mailing list is an  
echo chamber, and it may well no longer work with new versions of RoR.

In other words, of the solutions that meet your needs, go with one with  
a reasonably active mailing list and that has been updated recently.

Conrad T. wrote:

> Hi, I’m looking to create an online internet community for managing  
> user profiles and other data. Thus, I would need that has the  
> following features:
> 
> o authentication  
> - protect individual member pages/directories
> 
> o session management
> 
> o retrieve and reset passwords
> 
> In short, I’m looking to create an online community. Thus, can  
> someone direct me to a plugin(s) for completing this task? Finally,  
> I’m new to Rails but it seems alot easier than [ASP.Net](http://ASP.Net) being that I  
> have a Unix environment to work with and Rails seems to create few  
> lines of code from what I have experienced. Gotta go and thanks in  
> advance.
> 
> Peace,
> 
> -Conrad

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/a5b964/32.png) [@conz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/conz)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2006, 9:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/membership-management-system-plugin-gem/56805/5 "2006-04-04T21:57:26Z")

</div>

Thanks everyone for you comments.

-Conrad