Announcing Swedish Rails

I would like to announce my plugin Swedish Rails.

Rails provide many goodies and helpers for you, but some of these are dependant on your user interface being in english. Date controls, for example. Pluralization is another. And have you ever tried to capitalize a string with Swedish letters in them? Then you know it doesn't work that well. Until now, that is. You install this plugin, make sure all your Swedish source uses UTF-8, and most of these problems disappear. Downcase, upcase, swapcase and capitalize work as expected. Integer#ordinalize gives Swedish ordinals. And month names and weekday names are in Swedish.

This plugin isn't only for people looking to create Swedish Web interfaces. It can also act as a map for creating a plugin like this for any western language. Just replace all the text-strings in this plugin, change the module name and you're set to go. (Of course you'll have to know the language you're porting too, though).

The plugin can be found at:
http://svn.ki.se/rails/plugins/swe_rails
and some information here:
http://opensource.ki.se/swe_rails.html

The plugin itself is fairly simple. Most of it monkey patches different parts of Ruby proper or aspects of Rails. One of the more interesting parts (which could also be usable by itself) translates all internal month and weekday names in Swedish. This is probably the most interesting when doing Rails GUI's, since you don't have to create your own date_select tag, and all the other variations on this. I've also added som inflector rules, but only for the pluralize helper (so don't start naming database tables in Swedish, please!). The problem is that english pluralization rules are pretty simple. Just tuck an -s on the end and hope for the best. Swedish uses 5 or six declinations for nouns, and most of these are irregular. This makes it slightly hard to describe inflection rules for Swedish, but I gave it a try anyway.

So, enjoy! I just wish I had done this a year ago. Then I wouldn't have had to write sublty different versions of this code all over the place.