Trey Connell

My movie site is coming along well so far. We’ve made lots of progess on all the core functionality you would expect to see:

• Movie information
• Reading movie reviews
• Creating movie reviews
• Seeing new members and their activity
• Rating movies
• Commenting on movie reviews by others
• Weekly polls

I’m just about to start creating friendships on the site so that members can invite people to the site and request friendships from existing members. This seems easy enough to model – as does creating a “wall” where you can keep up with and communicate with your friends as well as allowing them to see all the movies you own and information of that sort. Before diving head-first into creation from the ground up, I went scouring the interwebs and ran across Tog.

Tog is a set of social networking plugins designed for sites / applications built in Ruby on Rails. Instead of trying to be a community in a box, the various plugins allow you to implement your site how you see fit and take advantage of the functionality provided by each plugin.

My goals in building the movie site are two-fold:

• Get back to my development roots since my current career track doesn’t afford me the opportunity to crank out code and keep my chops solid
• Learn a new language / platform / framework / development methodology

I haven’t yet decided if using third party plugins is a path I want to take on this path back to being a rockin code whore.  But if I do, Tog definitely looks promising.

Have any of you used Tog? What did you think? Are there other social networking plugins that you would recommend for a guy cutting his teeth on Ruby on Rails?