Searching and Filtering DB results

Hi all, im using rails 3.2.2 / ruby 1.8.7 and am having a bit of a problem googling what I need.

In my main page I am displaying all products of my MySQL DB and I want to have a sidebar that allows me to filter the results.

Filters are by textfields and dropdown lists (also comparing start and end dates but one problem at a time), like filter by location and quality(int value).

In rubycasts it only talks about meta_search/meta_where. The thing is meta_search and meta_where no longer work in this version of rails and other gems i've searched have been discontinued and no longer work in 3.1+ rails.

Any ideas on how I can make it work?

Thanks in advance