Chapter 10. Community

Giving users the ability to create and edit profiles is a good start, but for RailsSpace to be useful to its members, we need to have ways for them to find each other. In this chapter and the next, we develop three methods for finding users.

  1. A simple index by name.
  2. Browsing by age, sex, and location.
  3. Full-text searches through all user information, including specs and FAQs.

In this chapter, we’ll populate the RailsSpace development database with sample users so that our various attempts to find users will not be in vain. Then we’ll develop an alphabetical community index to list RailsSpace members in the simplest way possible. Though straightforward, the community index will introduce several new aspects of Rails, including ...

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