tab_tab is an MVC-violating (there, you’ve been warned) plugin that allows for easy tabbed navigation, without forcing your controllers to be named in any given way.

It makes for very clean views with zero tab navigation logic. On your controllers:

  class ElephantsController < ApplicationController

    tab :elephants
  end

On your views:

  <ul>
    <%= tab('/e', :elephants) -%>  # This will be <li class="active">...
    <%= tab('/h', :hippos)    -%>
  </ul>

That’s the simplest case. You can also nest:

  class ElephantsController < ApplicationController

    tab :animals => :elephants  # or tab 'animals', 'elephants'
  end

And on the view (notice the two levels of "active"):

  <ul id="first-level-tabs">
    <%= tab('/a', :animals) -%>  # <li class="active">...
    <%= tab('/p', :plants)  -%>
  </ul>

  <ul id="second-level-tabs">
    <%= tab('/a/e', :animals => :elephants) -%>  # <li class="active">...
    <%= tab('/a/h', :animals => :hippos)    -%>
  </ul>

You can also nest in the view using the tabs_for helper. The example above would become:

  <ul id="second-level-tabs">
    <% tabs_for :animals do |animal| %>
      <%= animal.tab('/a/e', :elephants) -%>  # <li class="active">...
      <%= animal.tab('/a/h', :hippos)    -%>
    <% end %>
  </ul>

And you can also call the tab method at "runtime" on your controllers (which means you can use it on before_filters, and/or with custom if/unless branch logic based on request parameters), like so:

  class ElephantsController < ApplicationController

    tab :animals => :elephants

    def edit
      tab :animals => { :elephants => :edit }
    end
  end

The tab helper in the view is hardcoded to produce an HTML list element with a link inside. Overriding it is easy, since it actually delegates all of the who’s-the-current-tab logic to helper methods (See TabTab::ViewHelpers).

CSS is on you. Patches welcome.

Copyright © 2009 Jordi Bunster <jordi@bunster.org>, released under the MIT license