I'm looking for a Rails plugin that eases the development of a "friends" system or social networking system for the latest versions of Ruby on Rails.
Before anyone says it...I know, I should probably create it myself, from scratch. And I am fully capable of this (I think). I'm just looking for a good plugin that can a.) make life a bit easier for me and b.) give me some ideas for reference.
I tried to make my own authentication system, and did what I thought was okay, but then I switched to restful_authentication and realized how poor my system was in comparison.
Thanks in advance...
U might wanna try Community Engine
from the website
CommunityEngine is a free, open-source
social network plugin for Ruby on
Rails applications. Drop it into your
new or existing application, and
you’ll instantly have all the features
of a basic community site.
it uses engines, easy to change layouts or do modifications
real world example - http://www.weebabystuff.com/
another option I know is Insoshi as Chuck posted
updated : look at this blogpost http://jimneath.org/2008/04/25/building-a-social-network-site-in-rails/
-- Ed :) --
You could look into http://lovdbyless.com/
This is a free open-source Rails social networking app which should give you plenty of ideas and pointers.
Ronald
You HAVE to see this railscasts video.
try acts_as_network plugin
The only one I know of is Insoshi. I haven't used it myself, but it sounds like that's what you're looking for.
I would recommend using OpenID library for rails to handle authentication.
On top of what others have said, there's also acts_as_network. The bonus of this one is that it's a pure plugin (doesn't require engines). Not having to worry about engines is a huge plus. The downside, of course, is that it's not a full fledged social network. It's just a friending plugin for models.
You might want to checkout the Amistad gem. It looks pretty simple and it supports both Mongoid and Active Record.
For avatars i would use avatar and try will-paginate for pagination. other then that i love can_serach to make it alot easier to search in the database.
You should also look at the other gems by technoweenie. There is alot of great stuff there that can help you
I've just been researching this myself and chosen to go with Bort & CommunityEngine
Bort because I am familiar with it already and it provides all you need in user authentication and basic application functionality. Community Engine because it is an Engines based plugin and some aspects of Engines are being merged into Rails 2.3 so I know what I learn will continue to be useful and because CommunityEngine seems more modular while lovedbyess and Insoshi seem more like complete applications and I suspect it would likely be more work to disentangle the features I want from the ones I don't. However, take that with a huge grain of salt since it is just based on high-level quick browse initial impressions.
If you just want an activity feed then there is the activity streams plugin
Related
This question aims to understand RoR and frameworks in general. It looks like RoR never had any standard user authentication system. Was it just historical reason (just happened naturally as it did)... or could it be intentional? Because RoR is a website building tool, more often than not, user authentication is a crucial part of a website.
To put it into perspective, another question is, do other popular frameworks, Django, Symfony, CakePHP, have user authentication built in?
There is no reasonably generic way to do user authentication. Most frameworks leave it up to you to choose the plugin that most closely matches what you're trying to accomplish.
For example, consider these two situations:
a blog which has a single administrator with password-protected admin-facing tools
a site like YouTube which allows users to sign up and administer their own content
Both of these sites would require vastly different authentication systems; which of these systems should Rails cater to out-of-the-box?
The Rails core team wanted to ensure that Rails was open-ended enough to make anything you want. There is no one-size-fits-all authentication scheme, so the core team decided to leave it out. Rails is easily extendable via gems and plugins, so that is where they belong.
Some examples are Warden and the Rails Warden plugin, Devise, Authlogic, and Restful Authentication.
CakePHP has a built in Authentication component that is pretty straight forward and easy to implement.
Most of these frameworks you mentioned are toolkits, not complete products. You build these things yourself, or leverage plugins from the community. Django's admin plugin/module has authentication out of the box though. Drupal does too, as a matter of fact.
Authentication can be(and is in my opinion) a matter of taste and need. If Rails was including things like that, it would start to become a website and not a framework. The programmer has to be free to choose among various implementations. That is why gems are available.
I've been programming a little in Rails and CakePHP, and I can say that Rails doesn't need to provide a mechanism like this. The community is very very good, and there are many examples (already said, like Devise, Authlogic...) made by very good programmers. Of course, there are many tutorials online (and also, railscasts, which are simply awesome) to program a succesful set-up for your project. So, if we have all of this, why should we need something like cakePHP mechanism? It's OK, it works, but there's just a very good tutorial and that's all( and maybe enough..). So, in the end, if u have a nice community you shouldn't care about the core of the technology, there will be always someone else more experienced with your needs that will do it for you. And if you don't find it, do it by yourself and in the proccess you will find a lot of help! :)
I;m a developer looking to make an app similar to chat roulette. I'm pretty comfortable with Ruby on Rails as my platform and would like to program it in that.
The downside is I have no idea about how to do anything using webcams.
Is there a plugin or gem for rails that integrates webcams easily?
Some quick browsing brought me to abobes site...but I haven't used it before, and though I dont mind learning new things, I'd like to get this out quickly so I'd rather stick to what I know.
What you do you use for webcams?
You would have to use a third-party plug-in to interface the webcam with the site. Rails takes care of things on the back-end (finding and connecting users) but you would need to use Flash or something similar to connect the web page with the camera.
This question is pretty old, but we've been able to use headshot gem in one of our apps.
https://github.com/diwadm/headshot
I'm introducing comments into a Rails application, and, being exceptionally lazy, I'm looking for a plugin to do it for me. I came across acts-as-commentable, but I didn't find much else. Acts-as-commentable seems fine, but it doesn't have support for threading.
Of course, it wouldn't be too hard just to home-brew the entire thing, but I think that surely commenting is such a common feature that there should be a canonical plugin to handle it. Can somebody with perhaps more Google Fu than me point me in the right direction?
This is acts_as_commentable_with_threading plugin which help you for threaded comment.
Link::
http://github.com/elight/acts_as_commentable_with_threading
The most lazy approach would be to use third-party commenting system like DISQUS : just copypaste a couple of javascripts and you're done.
Surely, it can't be used if your app has an authentication system of its own.
If you do not want to integrate a third-party service like Disqus, you have Juvia The Comments and Commontator. Also you can count with opinio as alternative. but only with Rails 3 and at the moment and as notice the development seems stalled.
I'am looking for a good Forum plugin running under rails3 ?
If you have any idea, i'll be glad to hear it :)
It's probably quicker to develop your own than to adapt and upgrade one of the existing Rails forums. There aren't many Rails forum projects as compared to PHP (for example), as it's generally pretty quick to write your own, depending on how many features you need. :)
I started to develop one too in rails 3. It's going to be similar to Wordpress Ideas. Right now i have build the user part with devise and integrated angularjs. I just started. If you are interested in contributing you can find it here: https://github.com/Chocksy/opiniodev-rails-app
I've recently started working with RoR for some projects and I quite like the framework - however coming from an ASP.NET background I'm quite fond of the idea of being able to purchase & drop in reusable components/control such as those from telerik, without having to 'reinvent'.
I suppose it would be possible to maybe create my own using partials or plugins or similar, but I'm wondering if there is anything out there already, or perhaps alternatives which could be massaged into place, like javascript widgets etc?
I don't know of any commercial components or "controls", but there's thousands (probably, I haven't counted them) of plugins out there freely available, to do a great many things for you, some of which would probably count as "controls". Unfortunately, there's no one place to go and find them, and the quality is depressingly variable, but there are a number of plugin indexes like http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/ that might help in finding what you want while weeding out the dross.
Ext JS is a great GUI toolkit. I can't say that it entirely fits in with the RoR way of doing things, but if you write your controllers to return JSON it isn't too bad.
One of the big differences between Ruby/Rails and the .Net world is the fact that most of the available plugins are open-source and integrate at the code level. There is an incredible array of plugins for Rails, and it is very straight forward to write your own. Due to the nature of Ruby you can hook into any just about any part of the language and framework, giving you impressive extensibility.
I am not sure how Web Controls work, but it sounds like they are a "black-box" that provides an end-to-end solution for both UI and data-level operations ... ?
Many of the Rails plugins do provide both UI and data aspects. An example would be "restful_authentication" which provides you with both some basic forms for login and user registration as well as an authentication module and a Active-Record model. Again, this operates at a code-level, so will actually push the relevant code into your codebase when you install and "generate" the authentication modules.
As for "widgets", there is no equivalent in Rails, per-se, but there are a number of JavaScript libraries that provide similar functionality. I use and recommend jQuery UI, myself.
Dojo has a widget library which might meet your needs.