Django current 'active' page highlighting for navigation

It is pretty common to want to highlight the current page in your navigation bar. Unfortunately it is surprisingly hard to do with django. After reading a few blogs I decided on the following, which involves creating a custom template tag and enabling the request context processor. First create a custom template tag (don't forget the __init__.py in your templatetags directory):

#!/usr/bin/env python
#project/site/templatetags/active.py

from django import template
register = template.Library()

@register.simple_tag
def active(request, pattern):
    import re
    if re.search(pattern, request.path):
        return 'current_page_item'
    return ''

Add names to your views in urls.py so you can reference the regex in the template. The prototype is '(regular expression, Python callback function [, optional dictionary [, optional name]])':

(r'^$', 'home view', {}, 'home')

Then in your template:

{% load active %}
{% url home as home %}

<li class="{% active request home %}">Home</li>

In settings.py define the 'request' context processor (you also have to define the other defaults so you don't lose them):

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = ('django.core.context_processors.auth',
                                'django.core.context_processors.debug',
                                'django.core.context_processors.i18n',
                                'django.core.context_processors.media',
                                'django.core.context_processors.request')

Now you just need a line in your CSS that does somehthing different for the 'current_page_item' class.