top ten rails plugins

As a Ruby on Rails developer I have always found rails gems and plugins very useful to use as it allows me quickly to extend the functionality with less code writing. Over the past few years I have used many rails plugins to get the job done keeping in mind the clients requirements. One problem facing Rails code is knowing what plugins are out there and how to use them, or which plugin is best for the job. The following is a list of top ten plugins/gems that you should be aware off and should really use in your rails app to speed up the development and enhance the functionality of your app.

1. Paperclip – Paperclip is an awesome Rails plugin by Jon Yurek at Thoughtbot. It is one of many plugins currently available that cater for file uploading and thumb nailing. It is very easy to use and has many features that were not in older file upload plugind such as Attachment_fu and file_column.
2. restful_authentication – restful_authentication is another very power full and useful rails plugin for authenticating users on your app. It will generate some basic authentication code for you which is a good starting point to your authentication system.
3. Formtastic – Formtastic is a Rails FormBuilder DSL to make it far easier to create beautiful, semantically rich, syntactically awesome, readily stylable and wonderfully accessible HTML forms.
4. will_paginate – As we all know that pagination has been removed as default and now is available as a plugin. Will_paginate is a clean, well written plugin that quickly displays your data across many pages.
5. Searchlogic – Searchlogic makes searching models easier than ever with its assortment of named scopes. It helps to keep your code DRY, clean, and simple.
6. Active Merchant – Active Merchant is an extraction from the e-commerce system Shopify. It was developed to for usage in Ruby on Rails web applications and integrates seamlessly as a plugin but it also works excellently as a standalone library.
7. acts_as_rated – The ultimate rating system for ActiveRecord models. Highly flexible and configurable, while easy to use with the defaults. Supports 3 different ways to manage the statistics, and creates all the needed associations for easy access to everything.
8. Open flash chart/graph – Generate flash chart/graphs for your data. It is a bit complex to use but very useful way of displaying data.
9. GeoKit- rails – This plugin provides key functionality for location-oriented Rails applications. It is full of features and most popular gem used for google maps, distance calculation etc.
10. Acts as tree – Acts as tree is a simple plugin which provides a parent association and a children association. I’ve used this plugin so many times to generate a tree structure on my sites.