title: Using Devise/Cancan/Rolify together
body: <p>I'm trying to set up an authorization/authentication system, and I'm getting confused, so I have a couple of questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>In a lot of tutorials, people set up a user/role HABTM relationship.
  I get that this allows for each user to have multiple roles, but if 
  you want each user to only have one role, is this necessary? If I     want to have options for "active" and "inactive" users, should those
  be roles or something else?</li>
  <li>In the Cancan wiki, it says if you want one user to have one role, you should just make it an attribute and then use "can
  :manage,       :all if user.role == "admin"", but isn't that
  dangerous because each     time "admin" is just a string? Does this
  matter? What's a better way     to deal with this?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I've tried my best to read through the documentation for everything involved and I started with this tutorial</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://railsapps.github.com/tutorial-rails-bootstrap-devise-cancan.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://railsapps.github.com/tutorial-rails-bootstrap-devise-cancan.html</a></p>
  
  <p>although I've also read 
  <a href="http://starqle.com/articles/rails-3-authentication-and-authorization-with-devise-and-cancan-part-1/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://starqle.com/articles/rails-3-authentication-and-authorization-with-devise-and-cancan-part-1/</a> and
  tonyamoyal.com/2010/09/29/rails-authentication-with-devise-and-cancan-part-2-restful-resources-for-administrators/</p>
  
  <p>I just can't really get it to work the way that I want to. How do I do this?</p>