Patch to add 'in-active-trail' CSS class to each menu item that is in active trail of current menu

corrected title

Thanks, this patch is useful!

I tried this out and it works quite nicely. I cleaned the patch up a little and have posted it back to the original issue. I'm marking this one a duplicate so we can keep all of the conversation in one place.

#219804: Set active menu trail CSS selectors

Solved the active trail issue for myself but since I am newbie dont know how to make a small module or use in temlate.php But it work in page.tpl
To work depends on taxonomy, taxonomy breadcrumb and pathauto installed.

$tid = 0;
$terms = taxonomy_get_children($tid);

print "<ul>";
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {

if(stristr ($breadcrumb, $term->name)) {
print "<li class = active >".
l($term->name,'taxonomy/term/'.$term->tid, array('title' => $term->name)).
"</li>";
$active_term =  $term->tid;


 } else {
print "<li>".
l($term->name,'taxonomy/term/'.$term->tid, array('title' => $term->name)).
"</li>";
}
} /* end foreach */
print "</ul>";

if (is_null($active_term )) {
$active_term =  2;
/** Default Parent Term form sub_menu  */
} // true

$tid =  $active_term;

$children = taxonomy_get_children($tid);

print "<ul>";
foreach ( $children as $child ) {

if(stristr ($breadcrumb, $child->name)) {


print "<li class = active >".
l($child->name,'taxonomy/term/'.$child->tid, array('title' => $child->name)).
"</li>";
 } else {
print "<li>".
l($child->name,'taxonomy/term/'.$child->tid, array('title' => $child->name)).
"</li>";
}
} /* end foreach */
print "</ul>";

Is it possible for me to set something like this up in a case where the menu item is like a dashboard page where you can click on many things but none of them of 'children' of the parent menu item? I lose the active-trail as soon as I click off the main page. It seems that somehow I need to specify which node, pages, aliases, etc belong to that dashboard to make this work.

I thought of a module like custom breadcrumbs so I can get the backend functionality to connect the menu item to everything else but I don't want to display breadcrumbs.

Any suggestions?