Adding menus in Rails 3 - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

A bit of issue here. Im trying to add a menu to all pages. Reason for this is the ease of editing a single file which updates all web pages.
In my layouts/application.html.erb I have this, between body tags:
<% content_for :menu do %>
<ul>
<li> page 1 </li>
<li> page 2 </li>
</ul>
<% end %>
<%= yield %>
And in my welcome/index I have:
<div id="menu">
<%= yield :menu%>
</div>
<h1>Welcome to my index page!</h1>
Not sure if all that is needed so when I go to my root, I only see what is in the welcome/index file and not the links. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Its should be other way around, that means you could call the :yield in application layout and have the content_for in your index file.
Actually the idea of the content_for tags are to allow slightly different variations for different pages but, still calling the same name from layout. read more about content_for from here
And I think , in your case what you need is a partial in the layout, or even you can have your menu in the layout itself. since the layout is visible for every page your menu will be available for each page, and if you need modifications in later, still you have to change only one page
1 - as a partial
#app/views/layouts/_menu.html.erb
<ul>
<li> page 1 </li>
<li> page 2 </li>
</ul>
#app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
<%= render partial: 'menu' %>
<%= yield %>
2 - having all in the same file
#app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
<ul>
<li> page 1 </li>
<li> page 2 </li>
</ul>
<%= yield %>

Answer 2

you should have the <%= yield :menu%> in your application.html file.
Also you can make a folder (lets name it "shared") where you can have your menus, messages etc.
Then you can try something like this
#welcome/index.html.erb
<div class="content">
Your Index Content here.
</div>
#layouts/application.html.erb
<%= yield :menu %>
<%= yield %>
#shared/menu.html.erb
<% content_for :menu do %>
<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li> page 1 </li>
<li> page 2 </li>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>