Post migrated from: http://thetacom.info/2008/02/17/my-10-favorite-rails-plugins/
These are the 10 11 plugins that I have found to be the biggest timesavers. Providing me with functions and features that I just won’t go without.
- stickies – Stickies is a plugin for Ruby on Rails that provides some easy to use yet powerful features for displaying status messages. It’s a replacement for the traditional use of placing such messages in the flash.
- acts_as_state_machine – This act gives an Active Record model the ability to act as a finite state machine (FSM).
- restful_authentication – This is a basic restful authentication generator for rails, taken from acts as authenticated. Currently it requires Rails 1.2.6 or above.
- cascading_stylesheets – Cascading Stylesheets is a plugin that enhances the behaviour of the built-in +stylesheet_link_tag+ macro to support a :defaults parameter.
- cascading_javascript – Cascading Javascripts is a plugin that enhances the behaviour of the built-in +javascript_include_tag+ macro to support a :defaults parameter.
- rails_tidy – This plugin allows html validation of templates and the response body of functional tests.
- engines – The engines plugin enhances Rails’ own plugin framework, making it simple to share controllers, helpers, models, public assets, routes and migrations in plugins.
- auto_migrations – Forget migrations, auto-migrate!
- dl_link_helper – A little rails plugin providing an additional link generation method in your Views for files to be downloaded. It adds in paranthesis this size of the file in a nice way along with the normal +link_tag+.
- will_paginate – Pagination is just limiting the number of records displayed. Why should you let it get in your way while developing, then? This plugin makes magic happen.
- Update active_merchant – Don’t know how I could have forgot this one. A great resource if you need to process payments with rails. What are some of your favorites?