The upgrade of Rails 2 to Rails 3 is a bunch of really helpful simplifications, including this one by changing named_scope to scope. Funny, it almost reminds me of how plain and simple the module names are for Drupal - Views, Backup & Restore, etc.
While simplifying it, Rails 3 adds to the scope concept by incorporating "chainability". I would normally refer to this concept as method chaining, but in this case of helpers, I gotta stick with chainability.
In short, scopes can now be chained together!
Here's a quick example:
class Memory < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :date scope :publik, :conditions => 'privacy = 10' end
Class instantiation then looks something like this:
res = Memory.publik.where(:user_id => @current_user.id).limit(5)