Changing Current Tab in Rails

Question

I have a list of tabs at the top of my application that I include in a general layout in application.html.erb. They look like this:

Answer 1

I'm so not claiming this is the best way to do this, however I am brave enough to post what I came up with :)

Some example menu links from my layout:

<%= menu_link_to 'teachers', 'show_date', 'Calendar', calendar_url  %>
<%= menu_link_to 'announcements', nil, 'Announcements', announcements_path %>

Then I created this helper:

def menu_link_to(*args, &block)
  controller = args.shift
  action = args.shift

  if controller == controller_name && (action.nil? || action == action_name)
    if args.third.nil?
      args.push({:class => 'selected'})
    else
      args.third.merge!({:class => 'selected'})
    end
  end

  link_to *args, &block
end