Plugins

A Rails plugin that is a drop-in replacement for Rails Action Caching. Adds many useful features including: last-modified header usage, storing response headers in cache, custom cache key implementations, conditional caching, and more.

Introduces a new level of caching for Rails in which content that doesn’t include layouts is cached. Similar to action caching, but more granular.

Plugin for high performance caching. From the site description: “Interlock uses memcached to make your view fragments and associated controller blocks march along together. If a fragment is fresh, the controller behavior won’t run. This eliminates duplicate effort from your request cycle. Your controller blocks run so infrequently that you can use regular ActiveRecord finders and not worry about object caching at all.”

Plug-in that provides improved migration support, simplifying coordination of multiple developers.

These prolific plug-in developers provide detailed blog posts on Rails techniques.

Here’s where to find all the plugins that used to be in Rails but were pushed out for Rails 2, such as acts_as_list, acts_as_tree, and scaffolding. You’ll also find other plugins that were never in the framework but have come from the core team, such as exception_notification and ssl_requirement.

github home of the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin. Use this plugin to connect to Google GMail from your Rails app. Pay attention to Googles TOU, as there are limits to the number of email messages you can send in one day.

jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails. Using jRails, you can get all of the same default Rails helpers for javascript functionality using the lighter jQuery library.

A modified version of the in_place_editor plugin code so that it works with Rails 2.0

A nice simplification for rendering partials.

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.

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.

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

Plugin for validating email addresses using the existence of an MX record as the test.

Provides a rake tasks that adds comments to all your models listing the database columns.

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

ActiveScaffold is a plugin that dynamically generates Ajax-based scaffolds that understand model associations and are customizable via configuration statements.

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

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 that makes using Textile as simple as it can be. The specified model field is always interpreted as Textile when displayed, except when in a form (for editing).

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

This plugin adds easily accessible debug information into your views. It adds a button that will pop up a new window that displays request parameters, session variables, flash variables, and assigned template variables.

A gem that supports using enhanced gems to replace Rails plugins.

These are the plugins that live in the official Rails repository. Some are in serious need of updating, however, and in some cases there are better alternatives elsewhere.

Auto-generates tags based on text content.

Plugin for using the Dojo JavaScript libraries with Ruby on Rails applications.

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

Legacy Rails core plugins.

Plugin for using Yahoo maps in Rails applications.

Rails plugin for accessing the FeedBurner API.

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

A plugin that replaces the view code produced by the standard Rails scaffold with a view that explicitly references each column, rather than iterating over all the columns, so it is much easier to customize.

Plugin that shows a simple toolbar over Textile text-entry areas, so you can, for example, click a Word-like “B” icon for bold and it will wrap the selected text in asterisks. (Display is still not wysiwyg, however.)

Plugin to provide a validation for email address formats.