What rails plugins are good, stable and *really* enhance your code?

Question

Anyone have a list of rails plugins that are both stable and give you enough functionality to be worth the extra effort of supporting?

Edit:

I am mostly interested in the best, most complete list of plugins so I can use it the next I'm starting a rails app. I don't currently need a particular plugin.

Answer 1

You can use bort as reference

Plugins Installed

Bort comes with a few commonly used plugins installed and already setup.

RESTful Authentication

RESTful Authentication is already setup. The routes are setup, along with the mailers and observers. Forgotten password comes setup, so you don’t have to mess around setting it up with every project.

The AASM plugin comes pre-installed. RESTful Authentication is also setup to use user activation.

User Roles

Bort now comes with Role Requirement by Tim Harper. A default admin role is predefined along with a default admin user. See the migrations for the admin login details.

Open ID Authentication

Bort, as of 0.3, has Open ID integrated with RESTful Authentication. Rejoice!

Will Paginate

We use will_paginate in pretty much every project we use, so Bort comes with it pre-installed.

Rspec & Rspec-rails

You should be testing your code, so Bort comes with Rspec and Rspec-rails already installed so you’re ready to roll.

Exception Notifier

You don’t want your applications to crash and burn so Exception Notifier is already installed to let you know when everything goes to shit.

Asset Packager

Packages up your css/javascript so you’re not sending 143 files down to the user at the same time. Reduces load times and saves you bandwidth.

p/s: agree with @eric, specifics

Answer 2

restful_authentication for sign in, sign out, sign up.

paperclip for file uploads.

rspec and shoulda for testing.

Could you be more specific in what you are looking for? There are so many great plugins for so many different tasks, it's hard to guess the right ones for you.