Top 10 rails plugin recommendations

Http://hosting.media72.co.uk/blog/2007/12/09/10-ruby-on-rails-plugins-you-should-be-using/

10 Ruby on Rails plugins you shoshould be using

One of Ruby on Rails strengths is how easy it is to extend with Ruby gems and plugins, becuase you don't have to code everything yourself you can save a of lot of time. one problem facing rails codes is knowing what plugins are out there and how to use them. the
Following is a list of 10 plugins that shocould make your coding life much easier and save you a fair bit of time.

1. attachment_fu-Anyone dealing with file uploads, especially images, shocould Take A Look At This plugin, It's a replacement for acts_as_attachment. the plugin is easily retriable and supports storing uploaded files in the file system, database, or on
Amazons S3 service. It also supports 3 image manipulation libraries for resizing and altering your uploaded images, image science, mini magick, and rmagick.
2. Register-tag clouds are not particle ly easy to code when you are first starting out. This plugin handles all of the heavy lifting for you including adding and removing tags and even tag cloud calculations.
3. minus_r-if you are not keen on the prototype JavaScript library and want to use alternative libraries without replacing the default rails JavaScript helpers or want to write real Javascript in your RJS templates This plugin is for you.
4. acts_as_ferret-powerful search plugin that fuilds on the ferret gem for enabling full text searching in your applications. ferret is a port of Apache's Lucene and enables fast powerful searches with very little code.
5. white_list-is essential for any site that allows users to input HTML to be displayed, this plugin in lets you filter out bad HTML tags and attributes to strip out unwanted code and reduce the risk of XSS attacks.
6. acts_as_ordered-This plugin in provides an easy way to find a records neighbors, great if you want to provide previous and next buttons on your site.
7. bluecloth/redcloth-these two are actually gems and convert markdown and textile syntax into HTML markup.
8. rspec-All the cool kids are using it these days, why not jump on the fashion bandwagon too? Seriously though, rspec is a way of specifying how your application "shocould" behave and then testing it actually "DoES" what it shoshould.
9. autotest-This makes testing a breeze, it keeps track of which files you are working on and automatically runs the tests for the file when you save them. when you hook this into growl you can get popup notifications that tell you if your tests passed
Or failed. Now you can concentrate on coding and forget about remembering to run your tests, works with rspec and rails built in unit test.
10. restful_authentication-this replacement for act_as_authenticated offers easy site authentication in a box.
11. acts_as_rateable-OK we lied, This is the 11th plugin lets call this one a freebie. Add a ratings system to any model, very simple to use neat little plugin.

We hope you found this list useful, try them out and let us know what you think of them. Of course all of the Plugins are fully compatible with our Ruby on Rails hosting packages.

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