Django: Figure out which item in a menu that has been selected

Question

I'm sure I've seen this question on Stack Overflow before, but I couldn't find it by my life, so here goes nothing.

I have a normal Django menu which uses the {% url %} tag and static names for the menu items. Now I want to have a different style for the menu item which has been selected. But the menu is being rendered in the base template, so how do I figure out which menu item it is?

Answer 1

You could surely do this with some ugly template code, but a better more globally known way is to use a CSS selector. This lets CSS do all of the work automatically for you.

Here's how it works:

You simply put an id in your body depending on which page you are on. Then in css you do something like this:

#section-aboutme #nav-aboutme,
#section-contact #nav-contact
/* ... put one of these per body/menu item ... */
{
    font-color: red;
}

You put the nav-aboutme, and nav-contact ids on each of your menu items.

The style will automatically be selected by CSS depending on which body id they are inside of.

Answer 2

I normally do it the way Brian suggested, but to accommodate for a template which a designer gave me which used the more common class="selected" method, I wrote a {% nav %} template tag.

Your HTML navigation template will look something like:

{% block nav %}
<ul class="nav">
    <li{% if nav.home %} class="selected"{% endif %}><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li{% if nav.about %} class="selected"{% endif %}><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
</ul>
{% endblock %}

To set the navigation in a child template, do:

{% include "base.html" %}
{% load nav %}

{% block nav %}
{% nav "about" %}
{{ block.super }}
{% endblock %}