Your template plugins/extensions for new project?

Hi all

Not started a Rails project from scratch for a while so I’m curious…
What are your “always in” plugins etc that you’d use for a new Rails
project?

Guess some people use templates for this task?

Not after a battle about why devise is better than
restful_authentication or
whatever, just keen to know what’s new. Been out the loop for a while.

With thanks

Matt

My two cents:

haml
compass
nifty-generators
rails3-generators
yard (for documentation)
shoulda
factory_girl
devise / nifty_authentication (heavy / lightweight)
cancan (for roles/rights security)

Garrett

msp wrote in post #972982:

Hi all

Not started a Rails project from scratch for a while so I’m curious…
What are your “always in” plugins etc that you’d use for a new Rails
project?

Guess some people use templates for this task?

Not after a battle about why devise is better than
restful_authentication or
whatever, just keen to know what’s new. Been out the loop for a while.

With thanks

Matt

Haml (including Sass and maybe Compass), RSpec, Cucumber, Authlogic,
Machinist, fast_gettext. Pickle might get added to that list, and I’ll
probably try Devise and Cancan at some point. But those are the
essential set.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone

whatever, just keen to know what’s new. Been out the loop for a while.

With thanks

Matt

Haml (including Sass and maybe Compass), RSpec, Cucumber, Authlogic,
Machinist, fast_gettext. Pickle might get added to that list, and I’ll
probably try Devise and Cancan at some point. But those are the
essential set.

I’d add will_paginate, fastercsv, settingslogic, and nokogiri to that
list. Seems no matter what I start, those always end up in there at
some point.

Ruby Toolbox is a neat site that will show you whats available for doing
various things and how popular they are…

devise and that’s it for me. With Rails 3, engines are the new thing
and everything I need to keep in an application, is now a part of my
engine.

Devise is one of the best authentication systems I’ve found around.
Very clean and modular.

For permissions/authorizations I developed my own system which is a
bitfields permission system. I used to use cancan, but it lacked what I
needed and that was a way to assign authorization to any object within
my application.

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote in post #972993:

rails-authorization will do this, if I understand your use case
correctly. I’d avoid bitfields myself.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone

No, I looked into all of that. With bitfields I can add authorization
to “anything”. It’s very fast too and I’ve spent a lot of times working
with it since my days as a developer with vbulletin products.

Alpha B. wrote in post #972994:

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote in post #972993:

rails-authorization will do this, if I understand your use case
correctly. I’d avoid bitfields myself.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone

No, I looked into all of that. With bitfields I can add authorization
to “anything”.

Of course you can. You can do likewise with rails-auth.

It’s very fast too and I’ve spent a lot of times working
with it since my days as a developer with vbulletin products.

Cynical translation: I’ve brought my PHP bad habits into Rails. :smiley:

Maybe not. I’ve rolled my own authorization on one project. Honestly,
I’m not at all happy with it. I hope to replace it with rails-auth or
something.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone

Thanks for the suggestions all… gives me a few new angles to
investigate.

The Ruby Toolbox site looks really interesting.
HAML/SASS I’m comfortable with but I wasn’t aware of the Grid/Blueprint
stuff.

Best

Matt

Hey I’m new to rails, so not sure what I’ll end up using, but in
addition to the above I found this:

Seems to include most things people end up using and a nice way to
start a new rails project.

Also coffeescript + node.js + rails seems to be getting more and more
popular:
http://blog.nicolasblanco.fr/2010/12/13/you-should-already-use-coffeescript-in-your-rails-app

As for permissions I believe this is built on top of cancan to give
true role based permissions:

Also, not strictly needed or directly relevant to rails, but these
look interesting:

Job Queue: GitHub - cheerfulstoic/job_boss: Manage asynchronous, parallel processing... LIKE A BOSS. job_boss allows you to queue jobs which are unqueued by a "Job Boss" daemon and handed off to "employees" to process
MongoDB and Rails: http://mongoid.org/
Command line argument parsing: GitHub - leejarvis/slop: Simple Lightweight Option Parsing - ✨ new contributors welcome ✨
Time Tracking: GitHub - samg/timetrap: Simple command line timetracker

Happy coding :slight_smile:

Alpha B. wrote in post #972991:

devise and that’s it for me. With Rails 3, engines are the new thing
and everything I need to keep in an application, is now a part of my
engine.

Devise is one of the best authentication systems I’ve found around.
Very clean and modular.

For permissions/authorizations I developed my own system which is a
bitfields permission system. I used to use cancan, but it lacked what I
needed and that was a way to assign authorization to any object within
my application.

rails-authorization will do this, if I understand your use case
correctly. I’d avoid bitfields myself.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone

For me ‘annotate-models’ is a must…

msp wrote in post #973069:

Thanks for the suggestions all… gives me a few new angles to
investigate.

The Ruby Toolbox site looks really interesting.
HAML/SASS I’m comfortable with but I wasn’t aware of the Grid/Blueprint
stuff.

I don’t want to get into a war here, but the reason I don’t use anything
like 960grid or Blueprint is that I believe that kind of fixed-width
design is great for print, but completely inappropriate for the Web.
I’m a big believer in liquid, degradable layouts – IMHO if you need to
say “best viewed at 1024 x 768”, you’ve already failed quite badly.

That said, if you do need to use one of those frameworks, I highly
recommend using Compass to get the extra abstraction that CSS alone
can’t give you. Otherwise you’ll wind up with lots of
presentation-based classes, which is a poor way to structure your CSS.

Best

Matt

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone