django-activelink

A Django template library for checking whether the current page matches a given URL. Useful for highlighting active links in menus.

# django-activelink

**django-activelink** is a Django template library for checking whether the current page matches a given URL. It is useful for highlighting active links in menus.

## Installation

You can install django-activelink from PyPI:

pip install django-activelink

Add `activelink` to your `INSTALLED_APPS`:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'activelink',
...
)

Whenever you want to use django-activelink in a template, you need to load its template library:

{% load activelink %}

**IMPORTANT**: django-activelink requires that the current request object is available in your template's context. This means you must be using a `RequestContext` when rendering your template, and `django.core.context_processors.request` must be in your `TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS` setting. See [the documentation](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#subclassing-context-requestcontext) for more information.

## Usage

Three template tags are provided: `ifactive`, `ifstartswith` and `ifcontains`. These take exactly the same arguments as the built-in `url` template tag. They check whether the URL provided matches the current request URL. This is easiest to explain with an example:

<a href="{% url " myurl"="" %}"="" class="{% ifactive " myurl"="" %}on{%="" else="" %}off{%="" endifactive="" %}"="">Menu item</a>

You can also pass a literal URL rather than a URL name:

<a href="/myurl/" class="{% ifactive " myurl="" "="" %}on{%="" else="" %}off{%="" endifactive="" %}"="">Menu item</a>

The `ifstartswith` tag checks whether the *beginning* of the current URL matches. This is useful for top-level menu items with submenus attached.

The `ifcontains` tag checks that the current URL contains the searched part.

**Note:** Django 1.3 started the process of gradually deprecating the existing `url` template tag and replacing it with a new one, which requires literal string arguments to be quoted. See [the release notes](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.3/#changes-to-url-and-ssi) for more information. To be forwards-compatible, django-activelink *only* supports the new version of the syntax. You can still use it in templates using the old version, but you have to remember to quote your strings properly.

## Development

To contribute, fork the repository, make your changes, add some tests, commit, push, and open a pull request.

### How to run the tests

This project is tested with [nose](http://nose.readthedocs.org). Clone the repository, then run `pip install -r test-requirements.txt` to install nose and Django into your virtualenv. Then, simply type `nosetests` to find and run all the tests.

## (Un)license

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.