Newb Menu Question

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
#1

Hey all,

I’ve got my Radiant shell up and running and I’m trying to figure things
out. One thing I’ve run across is building a menu and highlighting the
current page. Here’s what I have right now. It works but it’s really
really messy. I guess I could put it into a snippet or something but it
still seems like the hard way to do it. I looked at the <r:navigation>
stuff but I think that just works with children pages, correct?

<r:if_url matches="^/products"><li id="current"><a

href="/products">Products</r:if_url>
<r:unless_url matches="^/products">

  • Products
    • </r:unless_url>

    … etc …

    Basically, I’m trying to single out the current page so that I can apply
    a
    CSS id to it. That id causes the menu item to be bold and give you the
    feeling that your really on the page.

    I know it’s probably something really stupid, but instead of messing
    with it
    for 3 days I thought I would ask you guys for some help.

    Thanx!
    Richard

    BTW: The page I’m working on is at http://mail.kangaroobox.com:3000/.
    Don’t
    abuse me too much. :slight_smile:

    #2

    I used to recommend the <r:navigation> tag, but nowadays, I’m thinking
    body-ids combined with some dynamic CSS might work best. I might do
    something like this in the layout:

    Then in a separate (Radiant-stored) stylesheet, I would do something
    like this:

    <r:find url="/">
    <r:snippet name=“page_menu_highlight” />
    </r:find>

    Then in the snippet named “page_menu_highlight”:

    #page_<r:id/> #link_to_<r:id/> { font-weight: bold; } // or whatever
    you want to use to highlight.
    <r:children:each>
    <r:snippet name=“page_menu_highlight” />
    </r:children:each>

    Then when generating your menu items, set the id on each item to
    #link_to_<r:id/>.

    If you have pretty much static menu options, <r:navigation/> is
    arguably better, however.

    Sean

    #3

    Sean,

    Thats good information. Since I will be having mostly static menu items
    I’m
    thinking that <r:navigation> might work better. However, I don’t really
    know how to implement it for pages that don’t have a parent/child
    relationship. All the samples seem to focus on dynamic menus built on
    multiple levels of related pages. Or maybe I’m looking at them wrong…
    Do
    you have any hints/tips on using it?

    Anyway, my major focus is going to be simplicity and efficiency. I
    don’t
    want to put up a huge boatload of processor intensive code just to build
    a
    menu. :confused:

    Later…
    Richard

    #4

    Woo Hoo! I think I’ve figured it out. I have it working in all cases
    except the root “/” site (Home Page). Since every URL contains a ‘/’
    my
    ‘Home’ page gets selected every time. Hmmmm…I see that the
    <r:navigation> source shows that it can do RegExp processing but I’m not
    sure how to turn it on. I LOVE open source code, but my Ruby reading
    abilities are pretty weak.

    Thanx!
    Richard

    #5

    Richard,

    I usually put the home page in a separate case, outside the
    <r:navigation>. That way, they won’t all be highlighted. Something
    like this:

    <li class="active"Home

    Ruby regexps’ literal syntax is basically the same as Perl regexps, if
    that helps.

    Sean