Building Social Features in Ruby on Rails

I have looked at this myself. If you don't have a lot of users yet, don't build this feature. If your going to build it anyway, do it from scratch. You can use a state machine to set the message state. (Read, unread, trash spam, etc). Each message has one sender and multiple recipients.

I have built a fairly robust version of this if you have any questions.

OK, that's pretty helpful. A few questions:

You probably put your state machine inside some sort of message model. What actions did you define in that model?

Surely you must have a related controller and view. What actions did you define other than index, create, new, edit, and destroy?

Also, think I could get a brief rundown of your state machine's code logic?

Message Model --

class Message < ActiveRecord::Base

  #fields accessible
  attr_accessible :body, :sender_id, :subject, :user_tokens

  #set attribute reader
  attr_reader :user_tokens

  #relationships
  belongs_to :sender, :class_name => 'User'
  has_many :recipients 
  has_many  :users, :through => :recipients


  #create user tokens virtual attribute

  def user_tokens=(ids)
    self.user_ids = ids.split(",")
  end
end

User token grants read access to message object.

Controller --

class MailboxesController < ApplicationController
  def show
     @user = User.find(current_user)
     @messages = Recipient.where(:user_id => @user)
     @sent_messages = Message.where(:sender_id => @user.id)
     @message = current_user.messages.build(params[:message])
  end
end

Views can be found here

https://github.com/jodyalbritton/social-demo/tree/master/app/views/mailboxes

Overview of State Machine

https://github.com/pluginaweek/state_machine

It can get very complex rather quickly. You want multiple senders to be able to delete a message without deleting for everyone else. So you use states to set the message read, trashed, etc. Then in the controller just filter for messages of a certain state.

Great responses, Jody! Thanks!

Yea thanks, man! So far, so good

Do you know any tutorials / example apps for building a messaging inbox?