Joomla 1.5 Side Bar Navigation Menu Showing Current Page Possible?

So I am working on Joomla 1.5 and retro fitting an existing website to work with this CMS. I've got most of the templates down and I have created Modules for Side navigation on the internal pages. However, on the original website, php in clauses are used to change the class of the link to show the current page the visitor was on (e.g

            <a <?php if ($page=="career_opportunities") echo "class=\"currentpage\""; ?> href="?page=career_opportunities">Career Opportunities</a开发者_如何转开发><br/>
            <a <?php if ($page=="locations") echo "class=\"currentpage\""; ?> href="?page=locations">Practice Locations</a>
        </div>

is it possible for me to maintain this structure in the new side navigation menu I created in joomla? Do I have to make it HTML customized type Module? Do I need to find a way to capture the current page's ID? Where should I begin?

Thank you in advance

You can do it by using css also which will be much easy for you to handle this using css.