Starting with php and recently switching to rails, I have to say that rails certainly apply “best practices”. The nickname for rails is not an accident. It follows the rigorous Model-View-Controller paradigm that makes it easy to do the right thing. There are already many things that you probably always planned to do, but never came as an easy way to switch between production / development / testing environments, each of which has its own characteristics (i.e., during testing and development, emails do not send, but register). The migration infrastructure simplifies the deployment of modified models (database structures).
None of these ideas can be reproduced in other frameworks, and I assume that many of them have already done so. But overall there is a level of completeness and attention to detail that I have not seen before. Ruby, a language you need to get used to, but it's pretty elegant compared to php.
As far as security is concerned, perhaps your job is basically. Sanitizing input etc. Rails has built-in mechanisms to help you with this, but I believe that any other structure also exists.