Learning Rails

More Options

A complete application would support many more tasks around authentication. A few of the most notable include:

• An interface for managing users and privileges

• Letting users stay logged into their account on a given browser

• Finer-grained permissions for different categories of users

• Mechanisms that let users reset their passwords

• Email address verification

• Detailed account settings that let users set preferences

• OpenID support

All of these things, however, are projects with details that vary widely across different applications. The restful_authentication plug-in supports some of these options, such as connecting the password system to email, but most of this is work that’s very dependent on what precisely you want to build. The users model is a model like any other: you can extend it, connect tables to it, and build whatever system you’d like behind your application. The restful_authentication plug-in gives you a foundation, and you can build whatever you need on top of it.