Something here with lockdown and authlogic would still be cool, if there’s time maybe including authlogic plugins for openid, oauth, facebook connect, etc. That may be more than you can cover in an hour though.

I have a project I’m just starting that will publish pdfs using Prawn (http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/). I think this is a much better alternative than pdf-writer, but I haven’t actually started on the PDF generation yet.

It’s easy to remove prototpe/scriptaculous and drop in jquery. After that it’s just a matter of learning how to use jquery and knowing what plugins are available. I’d vote for more of a general coverage of jquery, maybe within the scope of a rails project, but there are no rails helpers for jquery like for prototype so for this one you just have to roll up your sleeves and learn the library.