Need advice: Structure of Rails views for submenus?

Question

Imagine to have two RESTful controllers (UsersController, OffersController) and a PagesController (used for static content such as index, about and so on) in your applicatio

Answer 1

One thing you could play with is yield and content_for, used with a few partials for the menus. For example you could put each section of the menu in a partial and then modify your layout to something like:

<%= yield(:menu) %>

You then can then specify in your views content_for and put whatever partials you want into the menu. If it's not specified it won't get rendered.

<% content_for(:menu) do %>
   <%= render :partial => 'layouts/menu' %>
   <%= render :partial => 'layouts/search_menu' %>
    etc...
 <% end %>

If you're using a lot of the same menus in most pages, specify a default in your layout if no yield(:menu) is found.

<%= yield(:menu) || render :partial => 'layouts/menu_default' %>

Saves you a lot of typing. :) I've found this to be a nice clean way of handling things.