Must have ruby gems for every rails project (2011 edition) [closed]

Question

Sup guys!

I've been searching around on StackOverflow and Google for lists of must-have gems that experienced people use for almost every project, but I've only been finding '08 and '09 editions.

What I'm looking for are gems that make features that will be used for almost every application (such as users signing up) much easier to implement.

I'm fairly new to rails myself but the following are some of my favorites:

• Friendly_id
• Devise

Hopefully the experienced Rails users could show me a list of some useful Gems that I can use for my future projects as well. Sharing is caring!

I know this isn't specifically a question but seeing as there's no active forums or community for rails whatsoever except this one, I've decided to add it here :)

Answer 1

yes, the trends are changing often. many of Rails developers use http://ruby-toolbox.com/ to see what's gems the actual and useful for today. choose what you need.

the most useful and popular in 2011 are the following:

acts_as_paranoid (300+ watchers) - ActiveRecord Soft Delete

eventmachine (1k+ watchers) - Asynchronous HTTP

refinerycms (1k+ watchers) - Content Management

nokogiri (1k+ watchers) - HTML parsing

rails_admin (2k+ watchers) - Rails Admin Interfaces

devise (4k+ watchers)- Rails Authentication

cancan (2k+ watchers) - Rails Authorization

paperclip (3k+ watchers) - Rails File Uploads

friendly_id (1k+ watchers) - Rails Permalinks & Slugs

god (800+ watchers) - Server Monitoring

aasm (1k+ watchers) - State Machines

passenger (1k+ watchers) - Web servers

And sure, Github trend are worth to see

Answer 2

will_paginate is still a really useful gem. An easy and elegent way for handling pagination in your rails app.