The “Authorization plugin” is an interesting plugin for Ruby on Rails that provides role based authorization for your app. It’s particularly interesting because it includes some ‘English-like’ dynamic methods that can use the defined roles. For example, user.is_fan_of angelina and angelina.has_fans? where ‘fans’ are defined in the roles table. Also look at the code example in the graphic above.

You can also do things like user.is_eligible_for_what (returns an array of authorized objects on which the user has the ‘eligibile’ role) and user.is_moderator_of?(group) (returning true or false if the user has the moderator role upon group). Powerful stuff!

The latest version was released just a few days ago so it should all be ready for full Rails 1.1 goodness. Read More

Shane Vitarana has launched a new Rails plugin called Rails Stats. It’s a graphical version of the rake stats statistics. It generates graphs showing information about your application, and is powered by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s great Gruff Graphs plugin.
Install like so:

script/plugin install http://shanesbrain.net/svn/rails/plugins/rails_stats

And then load /rails_stats on your running Rails application. More info here. Read More

There are many scenarios where you might want the same controller action / method in your Rails application to perform multiple functions. For example, a wizard with multiple steps or a single form with multiple-stage AJAX calls. What you want to do is provide a ‘context’ to the specific request and have the controller handle that in some different way.

Until now, one way to do this would be to use a parameter on the URL (e.g.: http://yourapp/post/show/1?stage=something_here) and then simply branch the logic based on the parameter. Bruce Williams saw an opportunity to make things a little better, and has developed in_context. Read More