How To...

acts_as_ferret plugin enables simple integration of the Ferret search engine into a Ruby on Rails project.

Step by step instructions for installing a full Ruby and Rails stack (with Mongrel and MySQL) on a Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) system. These instructions have you compile almost all of the code and install a copy of the applications into /usr/local. This process does not disturb Apple installed software.

Instructions for installing RMagick on Mac OS X, including how to use MacPorts to get ImageMagick running. Part of the larger documentation set for RMagick.

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library. SolRuby is dedicated to information about integrating with Solr from Ruby.

The most widely used payment processing library for Ruby on Rails. Provides interfaces to more than 30 gateways with a single, abstracted API. Extracted from the Shopify hosted service.

Delivering email may take too long when you have to send hundreds of messages. ar_mailer allows you to store messages in the database for later delivery by a separate process, ar_sendmail.

Plugin that bundles multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single pair of files to improve page rendering times.

A “micro-CMS” (content management system) Rails plug-in.

Plugin that provides a JavaScript widget for entering dates in a mini-calendar, and also parses many common text versions of dates—even things like “next Tuesday”.

Plugin for building location-based apps; provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation.

Apache 2 module that enables your application server to tell Apache when to send a static file. Use with Rails Xsendfile plugin.

A high-quality, but not inexpensive, package that translates HTML/CSS files into PDF.

How to set a global display format, input and validate dates with user-friendly formats, and a lightweight JavaScript calendar control.

Plugin lets you track visitors, referrers, robots, search terms and more.

Rails plugin to support the X-Sendfile protocol, which enables you to use Rails to do authentication while having the web server deliver the file.

Add gmail-like keyword search (using keyword:value pairs) to your application.

An exploratory project to automatically produce better documentation for Rails applications.

Rails plugin for accessing the FeedBurner API.

The FeedFetcher plugin locates RSS feeds, given the URL of a site.

A simple plugin that inserts the google analytics tracking code in your layout.

Listing of stress and load testing tools that are useful with Ruby on Rails (and other) web applications.

Mole is a gem that instruments your application and stores usage and performance information in the database.

Tutorial on uploading multiple files to a Rails application using a Flash-based UI.

Gem for analyzing Rails production logs to find the slow parts of your code.

Plugin that provides a cleaner interface to the PDF::Writer gem.

An open-source content management system written in Rails, developed in Japan.

Rails software bundle for creating recurring billing using the Braintree gateway. This is commercial software, not open source.

Spree is distributed as both a Rails plugin as well as a Ruby gem (requires Rails 2.0.2). You use the gem to create your application which automatically installs the plugin in your project. The newly created project is actually a fully functional store. All that remains is for the developer to customize and style to taste.

Flash video streaming platform built on Rails.

Doesn’t appear to have been updated in a while, but still lots of logging/analysis tools to check out.

Great list of tools for analyzing and optimizing your site’s search engine rankings, and for learning more about how search engines see your site and how people search for it.

Are you accepting sensitive user data? Passwords, credit card numbers, etc. By default, Rails stores all submitted parameters in plain text in the logs. This episode will show you how to filter this sensitive input so it doesn’t show up in the log file.

Excellent, detailed presentation on the finer points of sending and receiving email from Rails applications

Talk from RailsConf Europe 2007 on scaling Rails applications, based on the Twitter experience.

A $9 e-book from the publishers of the PeepCode screencasts, written by one of the ActiveMerchant developers.

Extensive description of how to use the Active Merchant payment gateway.

Includes a complete sample application that shows how to integrate PayPal’s Direct Payment API and PayPal Express Checkout. The Direct Payment API, when used with a PayPal account approved for Website Payments Pro, allows you to capture credit card information at your site rather than redirecting your users to the PayPal site. Integrating the API for PayPal Express Checkout allows you to immediately get transaction details when sending users to the PayPal site to complete payment.

Announcement-only list for issues relating to Rails security.