Best way to add “current” class to nav in Rails 3

Question

I have some static pages in a navigation menu. I want to add a class like \"current\" to the item which is currently displaying.

The way I am doing so is to add tons

Answer 1

To build off @Skilldrick 's answer...

If you add this code to application.js it will make sure that any dropdown menus with active children will also be marked as active...

$('.active').closest('li.dropdown').addClass('active');

To recap supportive code > Add a helper called nav_link:

def nav_link_to(link_text, link_path)
  class_name = current_page?(link_path) ? 'active' : ''

  content_tag(:li, :class => class_name) do
    link_to link_text, link_path
  end
end

used like:

nav_link_to 'Home', root_path

which will produce HTML like

Home