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Apr 27, 2008

Great Rails Plugins

I have been learning the ins and outs of Rails development recently. One of the things that I love most about this incredible web development framework is the number and quality of plugins that have been developed that make life easier for Rails programmer. There are plugins out there for just about any task imaginable, some good, some great. The best plugins, in my estimation, are the ones that are easy to install and that add excellent functionality with no hassle. Here’s an ongoing list of my favorites.

One of The most painful aspect of being a web developer, in my experience, is dealing with the constant stream of bugs, problems and deficiencies of the terrible Microsoft Internet Explorer family of browsers and Windows computers in general. Unfortunately, around 80% of internet users are using those godawful programs, so it’s not a problem that can be overlooked.

One particularly irksome defiency in Internet Explorer 6 is the inability to render PNG-24 with transparency. Over the years there have been countless attempts to solve this frustrating problem - one particularly good one is Dean Edwards’ IE7 javascript library - it solves most of the IE problems with a simple javascript include tag.

For Rails developers there’s another excellent solution to the IE/PNG nightmare. Enter Painless PNG. It requires no addition to your application code, all that you need to do is intall it, and voila - your PNG problems are pretty much over. Here’s the install:

ruby script/plugin install \ http://svn.wheremydogs.at/painless_png/tags/painless_png

The catch is that Painless PNG only works on Rails image tags. It will not work on HTML tags and it will not work on images triggered by CSS. That last one may be a pretty big downfall, but hey, the plugin is free and takes all of 5 seconds to install so in my estimation this is a pretty awesome plugin!

See it in use on the top left corner logo of my Montreal restaurant guide

Google Maps has one of the most popular APIs out there and for good reason. It’s an awesome API to an awesome application and it can add an awful lot to an awful lot of websites. I needed to incorporate Google Maps into my app and figured someone would probably have written a great plugin. Indeed, there’s YM4R. I experienced a smooth install, and found that it worked great for me without too much of a learning curve.

See it in use all over the darn place on my Montreal dining guide

Ruby on Rails pundits advise against using Rails built-in pagination, especially for queries with large result sets. Some say that pagination will actually be removed from the core Rails code base entirely in coming versions. Alex Wolfe’s Paginating Find is the best plugin pagination solution that I have found for Rails.

I have posted a Paginating Find tutorial. Or you can read more about at it the home of Paginating Find. I use it on my Montreal food reviews site.

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Gordon B. Isnor

Gordon B. Isnor writes about Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, Elm, Elixir, Phoenix, React, Vue and the web.
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