I’m pleased to say that we released SimpleForm 1.4. Like the last version, this release had a lot of contributions from the community, closing bugs and adding some nice features. Here is a brief introduction to some of the new features:

Custom Form Builders

Now you can set a custom form builder that inherits from SimpleForm::FormBuilder:

class CustomBuilder  'custom'
    super
  end
end

And use it straight in the simple_form_for helper, like the example below:

<% simple_form_for :builder=""> CustomBuilder) do |f| %>
  <% f.input :name %>
<% end %>

Custom Inputs

SimpleForm has many different inputs available in its source code. But, sometimes, depending on the business logic the application requires, we need to add new inputs to make our work easier. Before this version, you had to explicitly define your new input inside SimpleForm namespace for it to work. Furthermore, customizing existing SimpleForm inputs could only be achieved through monkey patching.

Inspired by a similar feature in the Formtastic gem, from now on you will be able to create new input types inside app/inputs folder in your application. The only restriction to create such inputs is that the class name must end with Input. See some examples:

# app/inputs/currency_input.rb
class CurrencyInput 
And the usage:
f.input :money, :as => :currency
You can also redefine existing SimpleForm inputs by creating a new class with the same name. For instance, if you want to wrap date/time/datetime inputs in a div, you can do:
# app/inputs/date_time_input.rb
class DateTimeInput #{super}