Adventures with Ruby

Here is the next installment of a series of guides I’m writing for internationalizing a Rails 2.2 application. Please read the first part, Translating ActiveRecord, if you haven’t already. This time I’m going to talk about how to localize dates and times to a specific language.

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Just a simple little advice for all RESTful programmers out there. It’s really simple, and cleans up your code quite a bit. A lot of Rails applications have two roles: an admin and non admin. Your code can get pretty ugly when implementing extra features for the admin. Read the rest of this entry »

After a long day in the train today, I extracted the I18n functionality from ActiveRecord so its applicable to any class. This can be especially handy if the source of the data is different, e.g. LDAP. Just install the plugin and add one line to your class to make it translatable:

[sourcecode language='bash']./script/plugin install git://github.com/iain/acts_as_translatable_model[/sourcecode]

[sourcecode language='ruby']
class User
acts_as_translatable_model

attr_accessor :name, :password
end
[/sourcecode]

Now you can do familiar things with the class, just as you would do with normal ActiveRecord models. Read the rest of this entry »

Shamelessly copy-pasted from the README file of the new plugin I released today:

Since form labels don’t use I18n in Rails 2.2 (I was too late in submitting the patch), we’d have to make due with a plugin.

Installation and configuration consists of 1 easy steps:

1. Run: ./script/plugin install git://github.com/iain/i18n_label.git

Example

In your translation file:

en-US:
  activerecord:
    attributes:
      topic:
        name: 'A nice name'

In your view:

<% form_for Topic.new do |f| %>
  <%= f.label :name %>
<% end %>

The result is:

<label for="topic_name">A nice name</label>

For more information about where to put your translations, read my post about translating ActiveRecord.

It was just three days ago when I discussed how to translate columns. At the moment I was writing it, I was already thinking: “this should be a plugin”. So today, I took the liberty and created it.

Contents

1. Installing
2. Usage
3. Validating
4. Customizing
5. Some extras

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