Move to new ruby / rails version

Add things we need to do here:

The vendor plugins are very old and the format of keeping 
them in a vendor dir is depricated.
rails-authorization-plugin
is a pain because it hasn't been worked on in years,
can we switch to using devise? Not sure if that would make 
existing users lose their passwords.

In the newer versions of rails the initialization / boot process
has changed.  We need to migrate the config files to the new format.