title: How can I make Rails 3 localize my date formats?
body: <p>I am working on a Rails 3 project where there is place for date input within a form. The text field with the date uses a date picker so there is no concern about the date being entered in a wrong format, however the date is being displayed in the :db format (e.g. 2010-01-21).</p>
  
  <p>(Note: this is specifically in form fields - e.g. <code>&lt;%= f.text_field :publish_date %&gt;</code>, which should automatically use :default format, and shouldn't need to be provided with a value)</p>
  
  <p>I have tried adding in a customized locale which has the following date configuration:</p>
  
  <pre><code>date:
      formats:
        # Use the strftime parameters for formats.
        # When no format has been given, it uses default.
        # You can provide other formats here if you like!
        default: "%d/%m/%Y"
        short: "%b %d"
        long: "%B %d, %Y"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And then setting my locale to this (<code>config.i18n.default_locale = "en-AU"</code>) however this doesn't seem to take and its becoming quite frustrating.</p>
  
  <p>The app will eventually support a number of locales, so setting up an initializer to override the date formats at application startup isn't really suitable, and I know that this <em>should</em> work - I'm guessing I've missed something here.</p>
  
  <p>The locale file is: <code>config/locales/en-AU.yml</code> and in my application.rb I am including:     </p>
  
  <pre><code>config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join("config", "locales", "*.yml").to_s]
  config.i18n.default_locale = "en-AU"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in my application.rb file.</p>