#396 Importing CSV and Excel

ZURB's Foundation is a front-end for quickly building applications and prototypes. It is similar to Twitter Bootstrap but uses Sass instead of LESS. Here you will learn the basics of the grid system, navigation, tooltips and more.

With the release of Rails 4.0.0.rc1 it's time to try it out and report any bugs. Here I walk you through the steps to upgrade a Rails 3.2 application to Rails 4.

Rails commands, such as generators, migrations, and tests, have a tendency to be slow because they need to load the Rails app each time. Here I show three tools to make this faster: Zeus, Spring, and Commands.

The ActiveModel::Serializers gem can help you build JSON APIs through serializer objects. This provides a dedicated place to fully customize the JSON output.

Learn how to easily add a user activity feed using the public_activity gem. Here I show both the default setup using model callbacks and a manual way to trigger activities.

Here we take a look at two tools to aid us in development: Better Errors which makes it easier than ever to debug exceptions, and RailsPanel, a Chrome extension to see Rails requests.

Rails 4.0 is still unfinished, but it is shaping up to become a great release. Here I show how to setup a new Rails 4.0 (edge) application and walk through many of its new features.

Allow users to import records into the database by uploading a CSV or Excel document. Here I show how to use Roo to parse these files and present a solution for validations.

Instead of presenting a sign up form to the user, consider creating a temporary guest record so the user can try out the application without filling in their information up front. They can then become a permanent member afterwards.

Turbolinks can make your Rails app feel faster by using JavaScript to replace the page content when clicking a link. It will be default in new Rails 4.0 applications, but here I show how to use it in Rails 3 and mention some of the gotchas.