Practical Rails Plug-ins

- Introduction to Plugins for Ruby on Rails
- What are Plugins?
- Example - Imageboard/Discussion Service
- Handling User Logins with Restful Authentication
- Enforcing Privilege Separation with Authorization
- Uploading Images and Generating Thumbnails with Attachment Fu
- Easily Add Lightboxes to a Photo Site
- Paginating Resources in Forums
- Login and a News Feed Sidebars with Simple Sidebar
- Example - Recipe Swapping Social Network
- Adding OpenID Authentication as an Extra Login Option
- Build a 5-Star Ajax Rating System with Acts As Rateable (Model Enhancement)
- Add Web 2.0 Tagging to your Model with Has Many Polymorphs
- Make Use of Amazon Product Data in your Models
- Catching Validation Errors with Assert Valid Markup
- Improving Overall Database Performance with SQL Session Store
- Example - MP3 Download Service and Band Showcase.-Build a Band MP3 Player with Flash Media Player
- Non-Evaling User Templates with Liquid.-Payment Processing with Active Merchant
- Using BackgrounDRb for Long-Running Tasks.-Better JSON output for Web Services and Mashups with Jsonifier
- Easily Add Tabbed Navigation.-Browser-Based Testing with Selenium On Rails
- WYSIWYG Resume Editing with FCKEditor and In-Place Controls.-Validate Your Data Using a Variety of Rails Plugins
- Quick PDF Generation using RTex.-Search Blogs and News With a Powerful Full Text Search Engine
- Internationalize your Application with Globalize.-Easily Embed CMS Capabilities with Comatose
- Example - Antique Search System
- Zero-Work Admin Interfaces with ActiveScaffold
- Version Your Store Inventory with Acts As Versioned
- Automatically Suggest Search Keywords with Acts As Suggest
- Radius-Based Location Searches with ZipCodeSearch
- Generate Bar Graphs with CSS Graphs
- Test Code Coverage with Rails RCov.-Leverage Memcache for a Performance Boost with Cache Fu
- Writing Your Own Plugins
- How to Create and Distribute a Plugin
- Common Strategies for Extending Rails

Nick Plante is the chief technical type at nth Metal Interactive and a partner in Ubikorp Internet Services. An accomplished network and web application developer, Nick specialized in Java and PHP projects before encountering the Ruby language. Since then he's been a vocal advocate in the Ruby on Rails community, co-organizing the NHRuby User Group and the 2007 Rails Rumble competiton. He also maintains a Ruby-centric blog a http://blog.zerosum.org.

Nick's professional accomplishments include work for various technology startups and creative firms, such as PortalVideo, DMOD, Verimatrix, Sterling Sound and Kosa Minore Creative, where he occasionally wrestles with nasty bits of ActionScript. Nick received a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in 2004 and has taught classes and spoken at events on several occaisions.

David Berube is a Ruby developer, trainer, author, and speaker. He's used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years, starting in 2003 when he became a Ruby advocate after he wrote about the language for Dr Dobb's Journal. Prior to this he worked professionally with PHP, Perl, C++, and Visual Basic.

His professional accomplishments include creating the Ruby on Rails engine for CoolRuby.com (http://coolruby.com), a site that tracks the latest Ruby developments, and working with ThoughtBot (www.thoughtbot.com) on the Rails engine that powers Sermo America's Top Doctor contest. Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including the engine powering CyberKnowHow's BirdFluBreakingNews search engine, and he also created the Slueshi text adventure game system, a multiplayer text game engine written in Ruby.

David's journalism has been in print in over 65 countries, in magazines such as Linux Magazine, Dr Dobb's Journal, and PHP International Magazine. He's also taught college courses and spoken publicly on topics such as "MySQL and You" and "Making Money with Open Source Software."