Recently on the ror-talk mailing list there was a question on navigational menus, which revealed some interesting resources.
link_to_unless_current helper
Goldberg, Integrated Site Design for RoR
NavTab Plugin”
The navtab plugin, which is part of SeeSaw toolbox, is a neat little plugin, which provides instant support for tabs in your web applications. We will definitely be using this on our next RoR application.
Nice, nice and nice. I wish I had known about link_to_unless_current before! Or maybe that's new. And now, for an off topic thought (but one that relates to NavTab).
I'm not entirely sold on tabbed menus. What I'd really like to see is a formal usability study on traditional navigation menus versus tabbed navigation. While the tabbed menus definitely *look* prettier, I'm not so sure they help usability.
I say that because not long ago the Denver Post switched to tabbed menu system. It looks cool, but ever since they did that I've had a harder time navigating the site (plus, I've encountered more errors with bad links). Or maybe it's just me. ;)
Thanks for mentioning our little tabnav, of course we're open to comments and improvements, so don't be shy! give feedback :-)
Tabs are one of the most used features in browsing. They really ease up the work and it would be very useful in every application.
Roger