Practical Rails Social Networking Sites shows you the complete development cycle of a social networking community web site. The project develops first as a simple content management system, after which author Alan Bradburne progressively adds features in order to build a full Web 2.0-enabled community-based social networking site using Ruby on Rails. The book offers practical advice and tips for developing and testing, along with guidance on how to take your site live, as well as optimize and maintain it.