<?php include ("_mainnavmenu.php"); ?>

That meant that I’d have to change the css value that I wanted to change on each page on the fly (my client wanted to
change the navigation menu entry text color for the active page).

With a lot of assistance from Claire Ryan, a developer on the Interactive Tools team, we came up with this simple and
elegant solution.

I created a class value in my CSS style sheet for the active class like this:

.active {
color: #FF0000;
}

My original mainnavmenu.php looked like this:

<ul >
<?php foreach ($navigation_menuRecords as $record): ?>
<li ><a class="special " href="<?php echo strtolower($record['url']) ?>"<?php echo strtoupper( $record['entry'] )
?></a></li>
<?php endforeach ?>
<li style="height:50px;">&nbsp;</li>
</ul>

I added the dynamic class by changing that code to:

<ul >
<?php foreach ($navigation_menuRecords as $record): ?>
<li ><a class="special " href="<?php echo strtolower($record['url']) ?>"><span class="<?php echo
stripos($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], $record['url']) !== false ? 'active' : 'inactive'; ?>"><?php echo strtoupper(
$record['entry'] ) ?></span></a></li>
<?php endforeach ?>
<li style="height:50px;">&nbsp;</li>
</ul>

The stripos looks for a (case insensitive) match for the $record [‘url’] value in the $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] (the
path to the file that is being accessed on the server) and if one is found it returns active, if not, it returns
inactive.

Since there is no class defined for the value “inactive”, the color is changed if the value of the class is
“active”..