Top three (or more) plugins

[Peter Johnson]

Nick and David, what are your three (or more) top plug-ins, the ones you cannot live without?

[Nick Plante]

That's a loaded question . I can't really say for sure, and it changes from week to week and project to project. That's what's great about plugins and OSS in general -- there are extensions that can help you with pretty much any task.

In general, I find the following to be applicable to just about every project and completely indispensable:

- Rick Olson's Restful Authentication
- http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/
- RSpec (also available as a Gem and usable outside of Rails, of course!)
- http://rspec.info/rdoc-rails/

Other candidates:

- One of the many file attachment handling plugins. Attachment-Fu is great (and David covers it in the book) but Thoughtbot's Paperclip plugin is also excellent.
- http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/attachment_fu/README
- http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip

- Matt McCray's Comatose plugin; this one gives you a whole micro-CMS subsystem 'for free'. Really powerful and can save a lot of time.
- http://github.com/darthapo/comatose

- Exception Notifier; You do want to know when your production app is throwing exceptions, right? Just install this. Or, you can use Hoptoad, a new (and free) hosted service that provides a plugin to log exceptions.
- http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/plugins/exception_notification/README
- http://hoptoadapp.com

[David Berube]

Like Nick said, it completely depends on your application, but Restful Auth and Exception Notifier are a good start.

Take it easy,

David Berube