So this month starts out dive into the wonderful world of plugins. Really, what is cooler than needing to solve a problem and BAM! someone has already done it for you. You just need to run a script, add a config value and, whewww, problem solved. Life doesn’t get much better than that. (OK, ok, in geek world anyway)

The biggest problem is that we don’t know what’s available to help us solve these problems. Enter PluginFest. We are going to expose some of the coolest rails plugins out there. This meeting will be the first, but I’m thinking that we will continue this topic for the next few months into 2008. (Obviously, were off in December.)

On the chopping block for this month, Andy is going to tackle acts_as_state_machine, and a few others. I will then whip through piston, along with exception_notification, acts_as_paranoid, and resful_authentication (time permitting).

Hope to see you there!