In Rails, how can I allow some html in a text area?

Have you tried this in the views?

 <%= content.html_safe %>

This is an old question but I guess there's a pretty straight forward view helper for this: sanitize. I presume you'd want to render the HTML tags entered by the user. For that purpose, save the content as a string and render as HTML using sanitize.

Example usage:

sanitize @post, tags: %w(strong em a code pre h2 h3 p blockquote ul ol li br),
                attributes: %w(href class)

The tags option allows you to specify which tags to use and same with the html attributes.