Rails I18N core translation updater and CSS naked plugin as gems
It has been quite a while that I created these two Rails plugins, but they still serve their purpose without problems even in newer applications. Since Rails plugins as a gem are much easier to maintain, I took some time to move these two plugins to gems. This makes them even more easy to use and especially more maintainable.
I'm talking about rails-i18n-updater, a plugin that merges and manages Rails core translations in your application — a helper that I don't want to miss in any i18n-enabled application anymore. And css_naked, a simple plugin that disables all stylesheets during the CSS naked day event once a year.
Both plugins are ready for Rails 3 and work well with Ruby 1.9, btw.
Rails I18n updater
The rails-i18n-updater plugin does two things to an application. First, it adds a rake task called i18n:update to your applications. This task can be called to download the most current translation files for the Rails core. Second, it prepends these translation files to the I18n load path at runtime.
This means, that you don't have to fiddle with Rails core translations anymore in your application. Things like date formats, weekday names, month names, time distances in words and ActiveRecord validation error messages are translated for you — and moreover updating them is as easy as calling rake i18n:update. Because the downloaded translations are prepended to your load path, you're still free to override them in your own locale files.
This seems simple, but becomes really useful if you don't want to do every core translation yourself and don't want to manually merge core translation updates. To use the rails-i18n-updater plugin as a gem, just add gem 'rails-i18n-updater' to your application's Gemfile (environments.rb for Rails 2).
rails-i18n-updater plugin: RubyGems Github
CSS naked
css_naked is a very simple plugin that just disables the stylesheet_include_tag helper during the CSS Naked Day event each year. Installing and using it is now as easy as adding gem 'css_naked' to an application's Gemfile (environments.rb for Rails 2).