You may have noticed that ever since the CVE-2013-0155 security vulnerability, Rails has been clobbering empty (or all-nil) arrays in parameters down to nil.

Well, kinda. They stopped in 3.0 stable, but continue in Rails 3.1+. It's time to stop the madness and just compact the nil values across the board.

OAuth is great… sometimes a little too great. When the bells and whistles of OAuth aren't worth the hassle of building your own provider, consider SSL Authentication. Collective Idea outlines the approach in their latest blog post.

Calling all Ruby developers:

Do you love writing gems? Me too. I've written a bunch of them. And I'm about to write another. But all I have is the name… search. I want your help to decide what's next.

Inquire within.

Periscope makes it easy to chain your scopes from the query parameters on your index actions. Includes support for ActiveRecord, MongoMapper, Mongoid and DataMapper.

I just released the first version of Figaro, a gem for configuring your Rails apps. Figaro helps you keep the private stuff out of your code, making it easy to open source your app.

For quite a while now, Collective Idea has been working with Oscar-winning voice talent to bring you a brand new series of Rails screencasts, and we finally have a few rough cuts. Feedback welcome!

At Collective Idea, we ♥ Cucumber, Capybara and ChromeDriver… and alliteration. But we recently encountered an issue with a very Ajaxy Rails app where we need to test a file download and assert its content. See how we did it!

If you've ever run into a brick wall trying to manage cookies within your Cucumber suite, check out Collective Idea's latest blog post for a handy workaround.

Collective Idea's latest blog post shows how to use Capybara 1.0 to easily test those tricky multiple-browser interactions.

Our latest blog post introduces a brand new gem json_spec and how to use it to test your JSON. It's especially handy for testing the output of your JSON APIs with its built-in Cucumber steps.

It's so simple… yet often overlooked. Put your conditional expressions in the right order and get an immediate performance bump. More in our latest blog post.

You may not know about the &&= operator, and you may never need to. But for the curious, learn how to set variables that are already set in our latest blog post.

They're not as scary as you think! They're no less secure than password-reset links and can give your users a much more pleasant experience. This blog post shows how to implement automatic login links easily and properly.

Learn how to change your Rails routes for a logged in user. Now that we can write user-centric routes in Rails 3, this blog post shows how to get the same result in Rails 2!

Rails 3 has a few new (and largely unknown) routing tricks up its sleeve. This blog post shows you how to use advanced routing constraints as a clean way to present more meaningful content to your users.