Most people have probably already worked this out but if you’re new to rails or new to rails login components, you probably want to use Login Generator and avoid Salted Login Generator like the plague.

Login Generator is extremely quick and easy to get up and running with, is made up of a small amount of clean code, has no dependencies and works with Ruby on Rails 0.13.

Salted Login Generator on the other hand is crap.  Sorry to the author of Salted Login Generator for putting it so harshly but it really is a mess and has caused me a huge number of headaches.  The feature creep seems to be what killed it – the localization is particularly problematic and makes all the code horrendously messy but depending on a firstname and lastname field in the database is bad too (should have just had login and let each application decide how and if to store the user’s real name).  If it were trimmed back so it just focussed on handling authentication it would probably be a lot better for it.