If you've ever browsed the source code of this blog, you might have noticed a directory called lib/active_copy. Opening up that directory is somewhat interesting, as you'll be able to see exactly how I take Markdown files with YAML front matter and render them through ActionView. But unfortunately, unless you fork this repo and hack it to bits, you were unable to use ActiveCopy in your own Rails projects.
At eLocal, we use the lovely Pivotal Tracker to track our work progress. It has a really great interface for viewing stories, and some additional features like tasks, rich text comments, and the ability to "predict" future iterations by using the velocity and "points" system (which is totally arbitrary). Another great feature is the story states, which are also arbitrary, but we use them for very specific purposes...for example, Delivered means the story has been placed on the stage server and is ready for testing, while Finished just means that I've pushed the code to master branch and it can be deployed at any time.
There has been a lot of hate towards scopes recently. I'm here to tell you that scopes aren't all bad, and they can be used to create some astonishingly elegant model definitions.