There are two things that i am especially looking forward to in Rails 2.3.

I use named_scope like all the time now since i figured out what they are and how useful they can be. I often find myself doing something like this:

named_scope :ordered, :order => 'surname ASC, first_name ASC'

Just so that i can append .ordered to any other named_scope and get my objects out in a sensible order. Well in Rails 2.3 we're going to have a default_scope

default_scope :order => 'surname ASC, first_name ASC'

Marvellous! :D

The other thing i'm looking forward to is the new super-slick render for partials. No more

render :partial => 'articles/article', :locals => { :article => @article }
render :partial => 'articles/article', :collection => @articles

Those now become the splendidly simple

render @article
render @articles

Thanks to Ryan's Scraps for explaining to me how that's going to work!

1. Aleksey Says:
   December 10th, 2008 at 05:02

   render :partial => 'articles/article', :locals => { :article => @article }

   is 'correctly' written as:

   render :partial => 'articles/article', :object => @article

   in Rails 2.0 - 2.2

   both can also be written as:

   render :partial => @article(s)

   but I think you probably already knew that.

2. Aimee Says:
   December 10th, 2008 at 08:49

   Oh that's cool! It's already simpler than i thought it was, then! :) Yay!

   I must confess, i don't know all the clever tricks when it comes to partials. I haven't used them often enough to get properly familiar with them.