Question

I’m looking for a quality Administrative plugin for Rails. It seems that most of the existing plugins/gems (e.g. “restful_authentication”, “acts_as_authenticated”) revolve around self-signup, etc. However, I’m looking for a full-featured Administrative/Management role-based type of solution — but not one that’s simply tacked on to another non-role-based solution.

If I can’t find one, I suppose I’ll roll my own…just wasn’t looking to re-invent the wheel.

Answer 1

There are a few out there. I have used:
http://github.com/DocSavage/rails-authorization-plugin/ for applications before in conjunction with restufl_authentication, but I believe it will work with any authentication that gives you a current_user method. On github there is also http://github.com/mdarby/restful_acl/ and http://github.com/danryan/role_model/, they are just role based stuff though I’d say not authentication as well.

The authentication and the access control role based stuff are all available as seperate plugins/gems to the best of my knowledge, and that’s a good thing as they are different beasts. Not all apps that have authentication need to have ACL type stuff and even some that do only need a really simple am I an admin kind of thing rather than a full blown user roles thing. So I’d say if you want one that does it all you’ll have to write, if you don’t want to do that than I’d say a combination of either Authlogic or restful_authentication with on of the authorization plugins will do the trick quite nicely.