How natively to set active menu item with metalsmith? - static-site

Question

i got a simple static site with a main navigation. working with the metalsmith generator.
Is there a native way to set current menu items active?
My current unautomated solution:
I just made a workaround like following.
A MD file page1.md as source of content with some variables i can define at top:
---
title: this is the site title
currentPage1: current
layout: main.html
---
<article class="featurette">
<p class="lead">Some content text...</p>
</article>
and my layout HTML file main.html. Where handlebars is used as engine.
i just post the part of the menu here:
<ul class="nav">
<li>
Link to Page1
</li>
<li>
Link to Page2
</li>
</ul>
both are going through the metalsmith rendering.
I got a current class on the Page1 in the menu.
Question
My solution is working so far, but as my site scales. I need to define the "current" for every site again and again. If I don't watch out this will lead to misconfiguration...
I do like to have freedom on my main navigation markup, as there are some specialities in. So I'm fine with creating this for new pages by myself.
Can i set active menu items somehow with the metalsmith-permalinks or metalsmith-canonical plugin or does there exists a metalsmith plugin suited for this case or maybe with another clever JS manipulation?

Answer 1

Use metalsmith-collections to create a collection of pages
.use(collections({
pages: {
pattern: '*.html'
}
}))
Then in your template loop through them to create your links:
{{#each collections.pages}}
<li>
<a href="{{path}}" {{#if_eq ../id this.id}} class="active" {{/if_eq}}>{{title}}</a>
</li>
{{/each}}
You will need to register a block helper like this: Handlebars.js if block helper ==
Make sure each page ID is unique.
For example:
---
id: phillip
layout: base.hbs
tagline: I haven't thought of one.
pagename: phils page
href: /phil/
navorder: 3
private: true
---