jquery-ui sortable getting error - PUT 501 (Not Implemented)

Have you tried synthesizing a request without the sortable? I have this sneaking suspicion that JUI is adding crazy temp elements that's formatting your request insanely.

Alternatively, whenever something works locally but not on the server, I figure that something isn't asynchronous that should be.

Instead of making a request on sort, log out the request's parameters. Do they make sense?

Check for the Limit keyword on your apache configuration.

chances are that by default you have something like that somewhere:

<Limit PUT DELETE>
    order deny,allow
    deny from all
</Limit>

This prevent the web server from accepting any PUT or DELETE request, thus the 501 (Not Implemented).

UPDATE:

So the thing you have found are:

<Limit GET POST OPTIONS>
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Limit>
<LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS>
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</LimitExcept>

This means only GET, POST and OPTIONS queries are accepted (allow from all) and anything not in this list (LimitExcept) is denied (Deny From All).

If you need the PUT keyword then add it in theses two settings (Limit and LimitExcept).

Note that theses limits are only applied for /home/*/public_html directories.

I spent almost 2 weeks working on this. I have tried Apache+Passenger and Nginx+Thin.

It ends up that none of those were the cause. It had nothing to do with the Rails app setup.

It was a Pound networking server that was stopping PUT.