I've been using the simple sidebar plugin in an app which is still in development. The plugin allows you to specify the sidebars (auxiliary content that often bears no relation to the resource being restfully represented in the url) at the controller level, rather than having the views, like the index.html.erb, determining what is shown. This works well with the CSS and DOM of my app because the sidebar area doesn't need to come in the resource templates, it all stays in the application.html.erb.
However, I haven't round a way for nested resources to inherit simple sidebars from the parent resource. This would really clean things up in my app - so there's room for improvement.
Does anyone have any other plugins or best practices for dealing with sidebars? I never hear anyone mentioning simple sideabar and the plugin hasn't been touched in a while, so it makes me wonder if anyone is using it and if there's a better approach to sidebars.
