First, please take a look at this pen showing just the menu + the code (preview the menu here).
Coming to the point: In the navbar that you see, clicking on the “Channels” menu shows the menu item sliding out. The problem is, the menu’s background doesn’t represent its active state (i.e. #fff background and #222 color).
Setting the background-color when the mouse is hovered on the menu, is easy. But this one’s tricky. I did try, :active selector to no avail. Any ideas?
SCREENSHOTS:


Since it appears as though using jQuery to add/remove a class is the only way to go, I went ahead with it. Here’s the code I used.
The code finds the link element
aone level down the element with.menu-itemclass (liin my case), and adds/removes class.selectedto the link element.Here’s a fork of the original pen with the menu functioning the way I intended it to. You can preview the new and functioning menu here.
(Full credit to the code provided in this question. More info in the official jQuery documentation.)
UPDATE: You might find this answer extremely helpful (a better, simpler solution).
Example code: