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P ractical Rails Social Networking Sites is for developers who wish to build real-world community and social networking web sites using Ruby on Rails. In this book, we will develop a realworld community web site called RailsCoders, which you can find on the web at http:// railscoders.net; the site is built on the same code that is developed in this book.

In this chapter, we will start building the RailsCoders site by creating a content management system, which allows us to easily create, edit, and display pages through a web interface. Creating the content management system will provide the beginnings of the RailsCoders site and demonstrate how easily you can create a functional application in Rails.

In this chapter, we will add user accounts and a role-based group system. This will allow your users to create accounts and log in to the site and allow you to maintain control by adding an administrator role to regulate who can administer the site.

In Chapter 2, we set up a system to allow an administrator to edit single pages. While this is helpful and allows you to set up the basic pages of a site, it would be much more interesting to have up-to-date news items showing on the front page, along with an archive of the news articles. Of course, it is up to you to actually add the news items, but doing so will help keep the site fresh.

In this chapter, we will look at how we can build a discussion forum for our community site. This will allow our users to discuss various aspects of Ruby and Rails development. We will also use the forum to talk about this book and allow users to discuss the code or sites that they have developed using this book.

In this chapter, we will build a blogging service for the site, allowing each user to create a blog (a reverse chronological list of journal entries). Each blog entry allows comments to be left by other members of the community. in the future, this could be extended to allow guest visitors to the site to leave comments, too.

In this chapter, we will build an online photo gallery, allowing users to upload their photos from their PCs to their profiles on RailsCoders. While this is a nice way for us to encourage our users to get involved on the site and to make it more personal, it could also become the basis for a community built around photo sharing such as Flickr, Fotolog, or Phlog.

In this chapter, we will add functionality to allow the RailsCoders site to send e-mail to our users. There are many instances where it is useful to be able to automatically send e-mails directly to users, such as sending a welcome mail when they sign up or mail to allow them to reset their passwords. In this chapter, we will create an automated mailer that will inform users when someone has left a new comment in their blogs, which will allow the blog’s owner to quickly reply to the comment.

In this chapter, we will add friends to user profiles. This will allow users to add other users to a friends list. This friends list can then be viewed by any user, but most importantly, it will allow you to keep up to date with your friends by displaying your friends’ latest activities on the site. Since we don’t want to cause privacy concerns, this will be limited to showing only simple information about particular actions, such as if they have uploaded a new photo or posted a new entry to a blog.

In this chapter, we will extend the photo gallery to support tagging. Tags are simply keywords that are used to describe a particular object. Tagging has become hugely popular for social web applications and is a very useful way of categorizing items that makes it very easy for users to search and browse objects. Some of the most successful web sites that use tagging are Flickr.com, del.icio.us, and Amazon.com.