Ruby

In this episode you will learn how to add custom routes, make some parameters optional, and add requirements for other parameters.

Do you ever need to generate HTML code in a helper method? Placing it directly in Ruby strings is not very pretty. Learn a great way to generate HTML through Markaby in this episode.

Ever wonder how to implement OpenID authentication in your Rails app? This episode will show you how to add it to a site with an existing authentication system.

Need multiple user authentication? If so, the restful_authentication plugin is a great way to go. It will generate some basic authentication code for you which is good starting point to your authentication system. Watch this episode for details.

Rake is one of those tools that you don't realize how powerful it is until you start using it. In this episode you will learn how to create custom rake tasks and improve them by using rake features.

The Railscasts site has been getting a lot of comment spam in the past, but no longer. In this episode I will show you how I solved this problem by using the Akismet web service.

Rails designates one helper module per controller, but that shouldn't stop you from making custom helper modules to help structure the code. Learn how in this episode.

By default, Rails uses the model's id in the URL. What if you want to use the name of the model instead? You can change this behavior by overriding the to_param method in the model. Watch this episode for details.

Have you ever wanted to temporarily disable all validations? Well, ActiveRecord doesn't support this, but that doesn't mean we can't add it. This episode will show you how to open up an existing class and change its behavior.

This is a brief guide to sending email in Rails. See how to configure the environment, generate a mailer, create a template, and deliver the mail.

Tests which rely heavily on fixtures are brittle and can be difficult to maintain. This episode will show a couple techniques for creating tests which don't use fixtures.

When two people attempt to update the same record near the same time, one of the updates will likely be overwritten. You can solve this problem with optimistic locking.