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I’d like to introduce two new contributors to the Rails blog.

First up is Chu Yeow. Chu has been putting together weekly Living on the Edge blog posts where he covers what’s been going on in Edge Rails. It seemed to me like it should be on the official blog, so expect to see his weekly updates showing up here shortly.

Secondly is Antonio Cangiano. Antonio started doing blog posts entitled This Week in Ruby a few months back which, as you might expect, cover all the significant events of the prior week. Antonio has agreed to move his weekly “Rails” stories over here, so we can all benefit from getting a summary of what’s going on in the neighborhood.

Then I should probably say a word about me, it’s not like I’m on the core team or work at 37 Signals so why am I here? I’m Gregg Pollack, one of the Rails Envy guys, and I’m here to help cover stories and help shape up the RubyOnRails.org website so the real core team can focus on coding.

So if you have any Rails stories that belong on here please email me (Gregg at RailsEnvy). Worst case scenario I’ll cover it on the next Rails Envy Podcast.

If you’re eager to learn how to use all the new features in Rails 2.1, Carlos Brando just released a free book titled Ruby on Rails 2.1, What’s New?. You can download the PDF in its original Portuguese, or its very recent English translation. This 120 page book covers everything you need to know about Rails 2.1 with many step by step examples.

You might also know Carlos Brando from the Ruby on Rails Podcast Brazil he does with Fabio Akita. If you’re a Rails developer and you speak Portuguese, definitely check out their podcast.

RubyEnRails 2008 is a Dutch Rails conference happening on June 10th. They still have a few tickets left, so if you’re able to go, there’s still the option. Lots of good speakers there including Charlie from JRuby, Obie, and the Phusion Passenger guys. I’ll be doing a iChat Q&A session as well.

Gregg Pollack has made a great video with interviews of speakers and attendants at RailsConf as a way of giving people who weren’t there a taste of what it was like. The result is 36 minutes of video and really worth watching. Check it out.

Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we’ve been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. This has been a huge effort by a very wide range of contributors helping to make it happen.

Over the past six months, we’ve had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. A truly staggering number. And lots of that has made it into this release.

New features
The new major features are:

• Time zones (by Geoff Buesing): Tutorial | Introdction | Railscast
• Dirty tracking: Introduction (partial updates) | Railscast
• Gem Dependencies: Introduction | Railscast
• Named scope (by Nick Kallen): Introduction | Railscast
• UTC-based migrations: Introduction | Railscast
• Better caching: Introduction

Thanks to Ryan Daigle for the feature introductions and Ryan Bates for the Railscasts. It makes writing the release notes so much easier :).

As always, you can install with:

gem install rails

...or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0.

Enjoy!

Michael has written up a guide on how to create and test patches with Git. A good read for anyone interested in contributing or following the development of Rails.

Pratik’s documentation branch for Rails has moved to http://github.com/lifo/docrails. This branch is open for all to contribute to directly. Just send Pratik a note on Github asking for access and it shall be granted. There’s even a page for the conventions used on the branch.

This makes it easier than ever to help improve the documentation for Rails and harder than ever to just sit back and whine about it. Make something great!

Threat level orange, guys! The release candidate for Rails 2.1 is drawing awfully close, so if you’ve been sitting on a patch that just must make it in now is the time to rise hell or high water to make it so. Once we cut the release candidate, we’ll be loathe to introduce anything but bug fixes to the features already there.

So get in your saddle, cowboy, and make that patch happen. Remember that the party has moved to Github and Lighthouse. Giddiyap!

I’m happy to announce that we finalized the keynote line-up for this year’s RailsConf and I can’t believe the great names we got (especially that last guy on the list, I hear he’s awesome :)):

• Kent Beck: Few people have had a bigger influence on the modern software industry principles, patterns, and practices. I’m reading his new book Implementation Patterns right now and can’t wait to hear him speak.
• Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software has always been a source of thought provoking, inspiring, and sometimes downright infuriating advice and opinion on software development. Joel is a great thinker and a lucid speaker on all things software and he’s been running his own software business for almost a decade to back it up.
• Jeremy Kemper: If Rails was an army, Jeremy would be the 5-star general who always made sure the job was done. He’s been a tireless force for improvement and implementation of the Rails framework since way back in the early days. Jeremy probably touched most of the features you enjoy in Rails every day. We’re finally getting him to talk about it too!
• David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes, I will most certainly be speaking at RailsConf again this year.

This lineup is of course in addition to the wealth of wonderful sessions planned. RailsConf ‘08 is shaping up really nicely. We have a brand-new version of Rails (2.1) scheduled to premiere not long in advance of the show and a whole year of collective learning to digest. It’s never been a better time to be programming with Ruby on Rails.

You asked for, heck, you demanded it, and now it’s becoming a reality. The original Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, is getting a facelift and the 3rd edition is now available as a beta book.

The book will be targeting Rails 2 and thus cover the many improvements in features and idioms that Rails have seen since the last edition of the book.

We also have a new author on board with the project: Sam Ruby. Sam co-authored the wonderful RESTful Web Services and have been involved with the Ruby and Rails communities for quite some time now. It’s fantastic to have him involved with the book.

A List A Part is featuring a special issue dedicated to Ruby on Rails. There’s Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails by Michael Slater and Getting Started with Ruby on Rails by Dan Benjamin. Both articles serve as great introduction to what all the hoopla is about. Great stuff to forward to friends who might be interested, but still haven’t made the jump.

Ruby Hero Award is a great initiative to highlight some of all the hard-working people in the Ruby and Rails communities who might otherwise not get as much exposure as their work deserves. So go on an nominate your favorite hacker and let’s celebrate the many great people doing good stuff.

Due to a snafu at the domain company holding rubyonrails.org, the site was turned into their default Google-baiting holding spot yesterday. The problem has now been resolved and the Google-bait has been eradicated. Sorry for the scare.

Lighthouse “version 2” deployed yesterday, so I’m officially opening the Rails Lighthouse tracker up for business. Other spinoff projects such as Prototype and Capistrano have already made the switch. As David has mentioned, this means the current trac instance is deprecated. It will continue to stay in use for now until everyone has transitioned to Lighthouse.

We’re still figuring out the new workflow with git, Github, and Lighthouse. I’ll be working with the Logical Awesome folks to improve the Lighthouse/Github relationship. I’m also working with Tim Pope (author of the awesome git-trac tool) and others in #rails-contrib on bringing the same development tools to the new git infrastructure. Tim also wrote some best practices for contributing to Rails from git.

Geoff Buesing has writing a great guide to the time zone support in Rails 2.1. It goes through all the new features including how to setup per-user time zone support and more. Really good stuff. Geoff’s work will remove a lot of pain for a lot of people. Three cheers to his hard work.