Hello everyone,
For the past few months this blog has been pretty much dead. I could give you tons of excuses as for why it has been so but that’s all they would be, mere excuses! And I assure you that you would not find any of them very convincing.
I received several comments recently telling me that you liked my blog and asking me when I plan writing again and believe me, it always goes straight to my heart. For some time now I am in the expectation that most of you will give up on me and remove this blog from your list forever but for some reason… you don’t!
Since I am a bit rusty at writing blog posts, I chose the easy way : a numbered list of Rails Gems/Plugins that I like. Hmmm, I know… it’s soooooo 2007! But, interesting nonetheless. If you don’t mind, I’d like that you share in the comment section the plugins that you like the most as well. Perhaps this post could become a reference to discover great plugins. Oh btw, from now on I will use the terms plugins and gems like they were the same thing.
- Paperclip by Thoughtbot
Very easy to install & configure. I use it for thumbnails generation and it works wonder.
- locale_routing by Perfectline
If you are developing a multilingual app/website (with I18n), don’t miss this simple plugin. It auto inserts the locale in the url without messing with your routes.
- thinking-sphinx by freelancing-gods
A fast and reliable free-text search solution for your rails apps, using the Sphinx daemon. The only thing that is really unfortunate with sphinx is that is doesn’t index new database records live out of the box. Instead you have to build the index manually or setup a cronjob at a given interval. The workaround is to use delta indexes with the delayed-job plugin but it forces you to have a rake task always running on your server. I had so much problems with the rake task getting killed for no apparent reason that I decided that live indexing was not so important. Instead I have a cronjob running every X hours that rebuild the index from scratch
- will_paginate by mislav
I guess we all know and use this one but I had to put it in my list anyway. It is such a great and easy to use pagination plugin.
- acts_as_state_machine by rubyist
This one I use all the time. Everytime an activerecord object can be in more than a single “state” (enabled, hidden, locked, whatever)… think about using it!
That’s it! Now, it’s your turn : what is your own top 5 list?