Elsewhere

ar_mailer is a system that automatically queues outgoing mails from Rails applications (using ActionMailer) by placing them into a special database table, to then be handled by a separate process, ar_sendmail. This could be particularly ideal for systems with mass mailing applications or simply as a method to speed up certain requests in your Rails applications since only a single database write is required rather than waiting for an e-mail to finish sending.

Evan Henshaw-Plath (more commonly known as rabble) is in the process of writing a book for O'Reilly about testing and debugging Ruby on Rails applications, and has just launched a companion blog, Testing Rails. The subject of the blog is exactly what the title says, and rabble hopes to post at least one in-depth tutorial relating to Rails and testing each week. The first is Building Tests from Logs - Test Driven Debugging.

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(
  :default => "%m/%d/%Y",
  :date_time12 => "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M%p",
  :date_time24 => "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M"
)

Richard Leonard demonstrates how to use the date formats that come with Rails, as well as how to override or add some of your own directly into Rails' helpers on the fly.

Mathew Abonyi has made available the initial release of PluginTestKit, his test kit designed to make implementing testing for plugins easy. If you're actively developing plugins and bemoaning the lack of a decent test system, check it out.