Searching and Filtering DB results

Hi all, im using rails 3.2.2 / ruby 1.8.7 and am having a bit of a
problem googling what I need.

In my main page I am displaying all products of my MySQL DB and I want
to have a sidebar that allows me to filter the results.

Filters are by textfields and dropdown lists (also comparing start and
end dates but one problem at a time), like filter by location and
quality(int value).

In rubycasts it only talks about meta_search/meta_where.
The thing is meta_search and meta_where no longer work in this version
of rails and other gems i’ve searched have been discontinued and no
longer work in 3.1+ rails.

Any ideas on how I can make it work?

Thanks in advance