Tonight I worked on updating a single attribute for an existing User. While I think there is still probably room for some improvement, I do have the basic functionality down. There are several rails methods that you can use to update a User in your database, update_attributes, update_attribute, update_column, plus some others.

I ended up going with update_column because it doesn’t talk to my Model and perform a validation. Right now this is the only way I could get it to work since I don’t want it to update all the other User attributes.