Chapter 13 User microposts

In the course of developing the core sample application, we’ve now encountered four resources—users, sessions, account activations, and password resets—but only the first of these is backed by an Active Record model with a table in the database. The time has finally come to add a second such resource: user microposts, which are short messages associated with a particular user.¹ We first saw microposts in larval form in Chapter 2, and in this chapter we will make a full-strength version of the sketch from Section 2.3 by constructing the Micropost data model, associating it with the User model using the has_many and belongs_to methods, and then making the forms and partials needed to manipulate and display the results (including, in Section 13.4, uploaded images). In Chapter 14, we’ll complete our tiny Twitter clone by adding the notion of following users in order to receive a feed of their microposts.