Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails, Third Edition

Chapter 6. Modeling Users

In Chapter 5, we ended with a stub page for creating new users (Section 5.4). Over the course of the next five chapters, we’ll fulfill the promise implicit in this incipient sign-up page. In this chapter, we’ll take the first critical step by creating a data model for users of our site, together with a way to store that data. In Chapter 7, we’ll give users the ability to sign up for our site and create a user profile page. Once users can sign up, we’ll let them log in and log out as well (Chapter 8), and in Chapter 9 (Section 9.2.1) we’ll learn how to protect pages from improper access. Finally, in Chapter 10 we’ll add account activation (thereby confirming a valid email address) and password resets. Taken together, ...