Let Ryan Bates take you through a growing series of great Rails tips.

If you want to change something in the layout on a per-template basis, content_for is your answer! This allows templates to specify view code that can be placed anywhere in a layout.

Everything you wanted to know about layouts: global layouts, controller layouts, shared layouts, dynamic layouts and action layouts. Yes, there really are that many ways to specify a layout.

It may have a goofy syntax, but the Symbol#to_proc feature Rails adds allows you to do simple blocks very quickly and easily

Learn how to use with_scope - a very powerful method which will allow your custom find methods to accept any find options. Just like magic!

Move a find into the model to clean up the controllers and remove duplication. Also see how you can call these custom find methods through an association.

No need to pass foreign keys in find conditions, just do the find through a has_many association.

Shorten simple finds considerably and improve readability by using the dynamic find_all_by and find_by methods

Learn a quick way to improve performance. Just store the end result of an expensive command in an instance variable!

In eight minutes, we go from scratch to a complete Google-killing enterprise-class search engine. But since the actual application only took 76,417 lin...