Though there’s been a few attempts at creating high-level, pluggable components in Rails, nothing has really seemed to catch on. There’s Rails engines and some full-blown CMS packages, but there’s still a tendency to built things from the ground up. Why is this?

I’ll list a few low-level tools that you can integrate into any project, that don’t mess with Rails internals and are dead-easy to set up and use.

• acts_as_tree or acts_as_nested_set

  Built into Rails, these will give you a tree model for any model objects. Sprinkle on LiveTree for a Javascript-based UI.

• acts_as_versioned

  Store previous copies of Pages, Assets or any danged model that you please.

• acts_as_versioned_association

  Building on top of acts_as_versioned, this provides versioning support for your associations, so if you had a Page that had associated ImageAssets you could retrieve an exact copy of your page along with the associated image assets at that point in time.

• Polymorphic associations

  Built into Rails 1.1, polymorphic associations allow you to associate a model with any other type of model through a polymorphic join association. This means you could tack a Comment onto any of your model objects, like in the following example:

  
  class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :commentable, :polymorphic => true
  end
  

  Adding comment support to a model is simply a matter of inserting a has_many one-liner:

  
  class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :comments, :as => :commentable
  end
  

• acts_as_attachment

  Provides both file and DB-based upload storage, as well has ImageMagick support for auto-resizing of images. If this isn’t flexible enough there’s the more image-manipulation-based ImageMagick for Rails plugin.

What other building blocks have you used when adding typically CMS-like features to your Rails application?

Written By:

Tim Lucas

Tim (aka toolmantim) is a Sydney based, possum-eyed web application designer with a bent for web standards and user-centred design. When not hiding behind his camera he can be found doodling interface designs and coding Rails at his company aviditybytes.