Well for starters I have always been a huge fan of the Unobtrusive Date-Picker Widgit and there was no existing plugin for it. But then since it’s so unobtrusive why not just use the built-in methods to use it? Well because it relies on a class on the year (and not the other selects) and a very specific structure to the IDs for the <select> tags, and doing this with the existing helpers was not possible. And thus the plugin was born!
The idea from the beginning was to make very nearly identical in usage and in output to the built-in commands so as to make it as much of a drop-in replacement as possible. I also wanted to use the 12 hour time standard since most of us don’t go by a 24 hour clock. Thus similar or identical options are available, and the output will be almost identical to that made by the built-in commands, it will of course work with a form builder and take data from a passed in model object to set the selected options. In other words all the Rails goodness one expects!
