You've finished the first sprint of your new Rails application and you're ready to show it to the client - or are you? Most user interfaces look better when they're actually filled with data. You could sit down and start entering records by hand, wracking your brain to think of new names and addresses. Or [...]

In Goodbye attachment_fu, hello Paperclip, The Web Fellas present a walkthrough of Paperclip, a new(ish) Rails plugin that makes file (and particularly image) uploads easy. It's well worth a read, especially if you're just starting to develop a new app and are looking at which file upload technique to go with.
Paperclip is compelling firstly [...]

There are certainly plenty of plugins available to handle authentication in Rails, with perhaps the most commonly-used being Restful Authentication. But there's always room for one more, and the latest I've run across is Ben Johnson's authlogic. It takes a fresh approach to the problem space, with one big advantage over many existing solutions: because [...]

Tog is a new extensible open source social networking platform that you can add to your Rails apps developed by Keras Software Development. It
Unlike the incumbent Community Engine, Tog is not a plugin - nor is it a stand alone application like Lovd By Less or Insoshi. It's a collection of many plugins and scripts [...]

Community Engine is a free, open source social networking plugin for Rails. All you need to do to add social and community features (e.g. authentication, profiles, blogs, photo management, bookmarks, commenting, forums, friendships) to an existing application is to install the plugin and just a small bit of coding. The plugin was covered on Ruby [...]

Exceptional is a new "exception tracking" and exception management application for Rails developers and their apps. It's currently in beta, but if you follow this special link, I'm told that Rails Inside readers will be prioritized in the signup process. It's developed by a group of guys working for a Web app development firm in [...]

SubdomainFu is a plugin developed by Michael Bleigh of Intridea that allows you to easily deal with subdomains in your Rails applications.
Not just a superficial hack, SubdomainFu even extends the Rails routing system to allow you to specify subdomains within routes. Example:
url_for(:controller => "my_controller",
:action => "my_action",
:subdomain => "awesome") # => http://awesome.intridea.com/my_controller/my_action

users_url(:subdomain [...]