Thread

I’m deploying EE on a client site and I feel like I’m struggling against the software to do something that should be very basic. In my experience, this often means I am applying the wrong mental model to the problem at hand.

I have set up categories (developers, resources, etc.) within a weblog (members). I have then posted entries (“Meeting Materials”, “Contacts”) and assigned a single category to each of them. So, there are multiple entries with the title “Contacts”, each assigned to a different category.

I am generating the section navigation from the category list, which is great. I am even generating secondary navigation from the entries with that category assigned to them. Sweet as.

The problem comes when I am in either a category page or an entry and want to determine what category I’m dealing with (for purposes of highlighting nav, etc.). Here’s the code that generates my section nav:

{exp:weblog:categories weblog="members"}
  {category_name}
{/exp:weblog:categories}

How would I conditionally add a class=“active” to the span tag for the current category?

Or… should I switch things around and use entries where I’m currently using categories? This should be easy peasy, but it’s throwing me for a loop. Help!

Andrew, have you seen this entry:

Dynamic CSS Navigation

I’m not saying this is the perfect solution, but I’ve used it before on client sites.

Seems like you could use an if in there comparing the {category_url_title} to the corresponding segment. Try this?

{if category_url_title == "{segment_3}"} class="active"{/if}><span>{category_name}</span></a>

Yes, it looks like the URL segment variables will work for my purposes. I’m not sure how I missed them in the documentation.

Thanks Sue and Brian!

Great suggestions!

As a note, you don’t want to quote and brace your segment variables.  Read Troubleshooting Conditionals for why.  The security note at the bottom definitely pertains to doing this with segments.

Instead, try this code:

{if category_url_title == segment_3} class="active"{/if}><span>{category_name}</span></a>

Oops. My bad. Thanks Lisa.

No worries - it’s a great code snippet; just wanted to make sure it was also secure. =) Thanks for stepping in with the solution!

This is a little ironic. Just a few minutes ago, I ended up using pretty much this exact same code for setting the active class in a category listing.

😉  It is a very handy approach.  Thanks for sharing it- and Lisa for tweaking it!