SimpleTabs

Super simple plugin/gem to easily add tabbed navigation to your Ruby on Rails application.

Installation

As RubyGem:

In config/environment.rb:

config.gem 'rubyguy-simple_tabs', :version => '0.1.2', :source => 'http://gems.github.com/', :lib => 'simple_tabs'

And then run:

rake gems:install

As Rails plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/rubyguy/simple_tabs.git

Usage

In your layout:

<%
  tabbed_menu do
    tab 'Home', :root # Use symbols. Instead of typing root_path, just type :root
    tab 'Blog', :controller => 'blog' do # The second argument accepts anything that is accepted by the link_to_unless_current helper
      child :controller => 'posts' # The children of a tab and the tab it self does not have to be from the same controller
    end
    tab 'Our products', products_path do # You can specify as many children as you like
      child :controller => 'products', :action => 'show'   # The 'Our products' tab will also be active when showing a product, ...
      child :controller => 'products', :action => 'edit'   # ... editing a product, ...
      child :controller => 'products', :action => 'update' # ... and updating a product
    end
    tab 'About', :about, :confirm => 'Are you sure you want to know?' do # Use all the HTML options you know from the URL helper methods.
      child :controller => 'about', :action => ['company', 'contact'] # You can specify multiple actions (or controllers or any other parameter) by using arrays
    end
  end
%>

The output will look like this if we’re at the show action of ProductsController:

<ul id="menu">
  <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="/blog">Blog</a></li>
  <li class="active"><a href="/products">Our products</a></li> <!-- The tab is active but you can still click it to get back to /products -->
  <li><a href="/about" onclick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to know?');">About</a></li>
</ul>

But if we were at the index action, the output would look like this:

<ul id="menu">
  <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="/blog">Blog</a></li>
  <li class="active">Our products</li> <!-- The tab is active and unclickable -->
  <li><a href="/about" onclick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to know?');">About</a></li>
</ul>

The tabbed_menu method accepts the following options:

:id => 'string' or :symbol - The id of the <ul> representing the menu.
:active_class => 'string' or :symbol - The class of the <li> of the active tab.

Two ground rules to keep in mind:

1. A tab is active if:
  a. we're at the URL of the tab it self or
  b. we're at the URL of one of the children of the tab.
2. The link itself will be generated by the Rails helper link_to_unless_current.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.