Custom routes for navigation_helper

I have a couple of changes worthy of mention.

Update your stylesheet

This is nothing major at all, but could potentially cause people to flip out. The CSS class that gets thrown on the surrounding list has been changed from “nav_bar” to “navigation”. So you may (well, you will) need do a search and replace in your CSS file. Or by hand, if you’re that type of person.

Why change this? Well, there have been a couple of times when I’ve used the plugin with sidebar navigation, and a class of “nav_bar” makes no sense. And yes, I’m picky about that stuff.

Besides, who is it to say that you’re going to have a navigation bar? What is a navigation bar, anyway? Exactly.

Custom routes

I’ve been contacted several times about this feature. I, personally, have yet to need it, but I can see its value (I think?). Anyway, you can now specify a custom route that deviates from the RESTful consistencies. This is better explained with an example.

1

<%= navigation [{:home => some_other_path}, :about, :contact] %>

Just pass a Hash with the value as your custom route. It’ll know what to do from there.

The Big Rewrite (not really)

I could be mistaken, but I believe navigation_helper was my first real Rails plugin. And by real I mean one that was actually useful. I’m a better programmer now, compared to when I first wrote it, in my humble opinion. And while there have been a few refactorings since then, I’m getting anxious for a rewrite.

Piece by piece I keep adding things, which isn’t the problem, but I’m making those changes in the context of the current implementation. It’s not terrible or anything, but I think it could be better. So we’ll see.

I could “refactor” it all I suppose, but I won’t because I’m a true programmer. I like to start from scratch ;-)