Creating a form macro is very easy and awesome for creating your own UI elements. The original downside I found was losing the automatic model binding from Form::model(). A user on StackOverflow helped solve the problem for me.
There are a few tips already for active states on navigation, however none are based on Route names. I prefer to use Route names for all routes, so here is a modified version of the "active states" trick for route names.
An example of how I did my filters.php and routes.php to populate many of the same structured routes.
Used Sentry 2 for Authentication and short syntax for array()
Suggestions to make it even DRYer are welcome.
php artisan route output of the example http://paste.laravel.com/1cnE
This trick is handy for wrapping all of your form elements with the same HTML/classes, which is especially useful for handling error states when using frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation.