If you aren't on the Ruby on Rails mailing list, you have no idea at the level of activity that is currently going on in the Rails community. There are new features, plugins and versions popping up just about every week. On average, I see around 50 new messages a day and about 5 new "annoucements" a week (give or take.)

The last few annoucements (both from DHH himself and from the community) have been very exciting. The two most notable are the annoucement of the final release of Rails 1.0 (which will happen very soon!) and the Rails Engines feature. With all the great plugins being developed, the Rails Engines (which is a plugin itself), allows you to keep your plugin code (Models, Views, Controllers, configurations, etc.) separate from your actual applicaiton code. This way, you can simply upgrade to the latest version of that plugin w/o any fears of overwriting your custom application code.

One of the first Rails Engines powered plugins is the Login Engine, which is simply the original Salted Login Generator, minus the i18n stuff, packaged into a plugin and installed via the Engine. This is a lot to take in at once, so the best way to understand it all is to watch a nifty video. All will be explained my child. Enjoy. :-)