I’m not going to cover how to actually code an entire social network site in rails as all social network sites vary in their functionality (and it’ll take too long). I will cover plugins and other things you might find useful though.
Quick Start
If you don’t really want to do the coding but want to get a site up and running and soon as possible, you may want to have a look at Lovd by Less by the guys over at Less Everything. Lovd by Less contains user signups, galleries, blogs, comments and various other things that you might want, so it’s a great starting block for your site.
Social Network Plugins
Here’s a list of plugins that I’ve found to be useful while coding my own social networking site:
Restful Authentication
RESTful Authentication is pretty much the defacto standard for user authentication in rails. It allows easily set up user signups, login functionality and email notifications. The plugin doesn’t set up thing’s like forgotten password functionality but there is a great tutorial over Rails Forum.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin source http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins
ruby script/plugin install restful_authentication
Paperclip
Paperclip is a brilliant plugin by Jon Yurek over at ThoughtBot. Paperclip is used for managing file uploads and attaching the files to models. You can read more over at my article: Paperclip: Attaching Files in Rails.
# To Install
svn export https://svn.thoughtbot.com/plugins/paperclip/tags/rel_2-0-2
piston import https://svn.thoughtbot.com/plugins/paperclip/trunk
Will_paginate
Will paginate is a great plugin for allowing paging of your records. Paging is a pain in the ass, but will_paginate makes it easy as pie.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/will_paginate
Acts_as_slugable
Acts_as_slugable takes the pain out of generating URL slugs. Everyone prefers meaningful URLs, so instead of showing a users page with ‘/users/231′, you can use ‘/users/jim-neath’. Nice.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install http://code.dunae.ca/acts_as_slugable
White_list
White_list is yet another brilliant from Techno Weenie. The white_list helper will html encode all tags and strip all attributes that aren’t specifically allowed. It also strips href/src tags with invalid protocols, like javascript: especially. It does its best to counter any tricks that hackers may use, like throwing in unicode/ascii/hex values to get past the javascript: filters.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/white_list/
Acts_as_commentable
Acts_as_commentable allows you to add comments to your models. It takes care of all the polymorphic associations for you, which is nice.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install http://juixe.com/svn/acts_as_commentable
ReCAPTCHA
Fucking captchas. Unfortunately a necessary evil. If you’re going to use captchas then you might as well help to digitalise books. The reCAPTCHA plugin utilises the reCAPTCHA service which digitalises books by making users input the text.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install svn.ambethia.com/pub/rails/plugins/recaptcha/
Acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
Everybody loves tagging, surely? Tag pictures, videos, blog posts, whatever you want. Acts_as_taggable_on_steroids is a great plugin for allowing your users to tag their stuff. It allows tag clouds and all that web 2.0 jazz everyone seems to love.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
Exception Notifier
Exception Notifier is a must have. It emails you when your live application fails. No matter how much testing you do, no doubt there’s going to be a scenario where it fails and when that happens you want to know.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install exception_notification
Throttler
This is one of my favourite plugins. Say your site get’s slashdotted of dugg and you end up with immense traffic, the main thing is to keep your site up and running. This is where throttler comes in. You can throttle certain actions on your site when your server load is above a certain level. So you could disable video uploads while your server load is above x to prevent your server from crumbling.
# To Install
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.kabisa.nl/rails/plugins/throttler
Backup_fu
You’ve been working on your social network site for months and finally the traffic is coming in and you have a decent user base. Then one day your server dies and you lose all your data. Woe is you. You should have backed up. Using Backup_fu you can automatically backup your database and files to Amazon S3.
# To Install
sudo gem install aws-s3
ruby script/plugin install http://backup-fu.googlecode.com/svn/backup_fu/
Fischy Friends
Fischy_friends is a plugin by Daniel Fischer. It’s a great starting point for a friends system. I’ve used it on a couple of my own projects and it’s worked great for me.
# Github http://github.com/dfischer/fischyfriends/tree/master
Other Useful Tools
SWFUpload
I love SWFUpload. It uses a small flash file to allow users to upload multiple files at once. The front end is completely open and coded in javascript so you can customise it how you like. You can see the demos here.
Download: http://swfupload.googlecode.com/files/SWFUpload%20v2.0.2.Release.zip
TinyMCE Text Editor
TinyMCE is WYSIWYG editor coded entirely in javascript. It’s useful for the less techno savvy of your users (which will no doubt be most). There’s a whole load of plugins available for the editor so it’s highly extensible.
Download: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tinymce/tinymce_3_0_7.zip?download
FFMPEG/Mencoder
FFMPEG is a command line utility to convert various formats of video into other formats. The main use you’ll want to use this for is to convert videos into flv files for use with a flash video player.
JW FLV Media Player
The JW FLV Media Player (built with Adobe’s Flash) is an easy and flexible way to add video and audio to your website. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, but also MP3, H264, SWF, JPG, PNG and GIF). It also supports RTMP and HTTP (Lighttpd) streaming, RSS, XSPF and ASX playlists, a wide range of flashvars (variables), an extensive javascript API and accessibility features.
Rails Hosting
Once you’ve got your wonderful social network finished, you’re going to want somewhere to host the beast.
I highly recommend checking out Brightbox for all your hosting needs. They offer affordable servers complete with Five Runs.
Books
RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails
“Ruby on Rails is fast displacing PHP, ASP, and J2EE as the development framework of choice for discriminating programmers, thanks to its elegant design and emphasis on practical results. RailsSpace teaches you to build large-scale projects with Rails by developing a real-world application: a social networking website like MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster.
Inside, the authors walk you step by step from the creation of the site’s virtually static front page, through user registration and authentication, and into a highly dynamic site, complete with user profiles, image upload, email, blogs, full-text and geographical search, and a friendship request system. In the process, you learn how Rails helps you control code complexity with the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, abstraction layers, automated testing, and code refactoring, allowing you to scale up to a large project even with a small number of developers.
This essential introduction to Rails provides
- A tutorial approach that allows you to experience Rails as it is actually used
- A solid foundation for creating any login-based website in Rails
- Coverage of newer and more advanced Rails features, such as form generators, REST, and Ajax (including RJS)
- A thorough and integrated introduction to automated testing
The book’s companion website provides the application source code, a blog with follow-up articles, narrated screencasts, and a working version of the RailSpace social network.”
(Possibly) Related Posts
If you found this post or anything else on this site of any use, then please take the time to recommend me on Working with Rails.


