I have put a small monkey patch to allow for better String.to_date handling. It works great on strings but it seems mongoid has its own method for trying to convert the string into a date. I am doing this because ruby expects a "DD/MM/YY" where my monkey patch will allow for any localized date format and covert it to a Date object.
I need to do a similar monkey patch to Mongoid.
app/config/initializers/string_to_date_monkey_match.rb
class String
def to_date
Chronic.parse(self).to_date
end
end