Simple helper for CakePHP that detects if a link routes to the current controller and styles a list element accordingly.

Based off of MenuHelper by Malte Wassermann, but all I was using it for was to highlight menu items from the current controller so I figured I could do away with the regex and have the highlighting based off of the link's routes.

• wraps all passed links with list <li> elements
• detects if the passed link routes to the current controller, then applies a specified style to the list element

Install to app/View/Helper/.

For CakePHP 2.x before 2.2: you must replace Hash::merge() with Set::merge().

After installing you must include 'Menu' in the $helper array of any controllers you want to use it in. To have it available to all controllers, include 'Menu' in the $helper array in app/Controller/AppController.php.

In your controller:

// app/Controller/ExampleController.php
class ExampleController extends Controller {
public $helpers = array( ... , 'Menu')
...
}

In your view:

// app/View/Example/view.ctp
...
<ul>
  <?php echo $this->Menu->item($this->Html->link('Home', '/home')); ?>
  <?php echo $this->Menu->item($this->Html->link('Example', '/example/add')); ?>
  <?php echo $this->Menu->item($this->Html->link('Example', array('controller' => 'example', 'action' => 'index')); ?>
  <?php echo $this->Menu->item($this->Html->link('Example', '/examplealternate')); ?>
  <?php echo $this->Menu->item($this->Html->link('About', '/about'), array('class' => 'specialClass')); ?>
  <?php echo $this->Menu->item($this->Html->link('Contact', array('controller' => 'contact', 'action' => 'index')); ?>
</ul>
...

Assume you were navigated to http://yourapp/example/view, which is an action of your ExampleController. When the above code is executed the following would happen:

• all the links would be of the form <li><a href="..."></a></li>, and any attributes passed for the <li> elements will be preserved
• the links that route to ExampleController in app/Config/routes.php will have the specified class attached to the <li> element to signify the controller is currently active
• links can be passed in string form, or array form, and will be properly detected as the current controller as long as the route is known by Cake
• i.e. /examplealternate would also have the class attached to it assuming it was set to route to ExampleController in routes.php

• I know how useful it would be to only apply the style to a link that routes to the controller and action
• properly convert Malte's original regex version of MenuHelper to CakePHP 2.0

This code is licensed under the MIT license.