# How do you deal with sidebars in layouts?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-you-deal-with-sidebars-in-layouts/142949>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 13, 2008, 10:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-you-deal-with-sidebars-in-layouts/142949 "2008-07-13T22:12:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![chunkyslink](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@chunkyslink](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chunkyslink)\
**Post date:** [July 13, 2008, 10:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-you-deal-with-sidebars-in-layouts/142949/1 "2008-07-13T22:12:09Z")

</div>

I’ve been using the simple sidebar plugin in an app which is still in  
development. The plugin allows you to specify the sidebars (auxiliary  
content that often bears no relation to the resource being restfully  
represented in the url) at the controller level, rather than having the  
views, like the index.html.erb, determining what is shown. This works  
well with the CSS and DOM of my app because the sidebar area doesn’t  
need to come in the resource templates, it all stays in the  
application.html.erb.

However, I haven’t round a way for nested resources to inherit simple  
sidebars from the parent resource. This would really clean things up in  
my app - so there’s room for improvement.

Does anyone have any other plugins or best practices for dealing with  
sidebars? I never hear anyone mentioning simple sideabar and the plugin  
hasn’t been touched in a while, so it makes me wonder if anyone is using  
it and if there’s a better approach to sidebars.