Ruby on Rails brings everything you need to create high quality web applications out of the box! But eventually you’ll find that you are duplicating functionality like the same user login page and search page in multiple applications. Or you want to add new behavior to the core Rails code.

Rails plugins to the rescue! Rails plugins make it blindingly simple to share functionality across multiple Rails applications. You can do everything from adding new behaviors to your models, modifying how migrations work, to adding new helpers for your views. We’ll look at some popular plugins like “acts_as_ferret” for easy search, “tabnav” for simple tabs in your application, and “Foreign Key Migrations” for easily adding foreign key relationships to your Rails migration scripts.

We’ll finish up by writing “acts_as_lavalamp” plugin that demonstrates extending a model to communicate information via a Lava Lamp. You’ll learn the various approaches to use in writing plugins, how to test them, and how to share them. We’ll cover best practices for managing them, finishing up with some tools for finding plugins available from the Web.