Breadcrumb

Breadcrumbs can be a pain. They need to consistent across the entire of a site, but in many cases you simply don’t have all the same data, all the time.

Basic Usage

What you want

You’d like a breadcrumb to be something like : *Our Site > Journal > 2010 > August > What a day we’ve had*, where each segment is links to the relevant url.

What to do

Using the minimum of options you just need to use the tag :

{exp:jb_breadcrumb}

What you’ll get

Using the main tag, with no paramaters supplied, it will return something of the form :

You are here : Home » Segment 1 » Segment 2 .. 

How it works

From a technical point of view it breaks the uri (ie. /news/09/03/entry_title) into an array of the segments. For each part of that array it checks if there’s a corresponding unique url_title in the system, if it finds one it uses that as the value, if not, it tries to clean the segment up as best it can.

Extra options

When you’re ready to move beyond the basic functionality there are some extra options for you to play around with.

• Parse Dates

  parse_dates=“yes” defaults to “no”

  Try and turn numbers in the url into corresponding date values. Looks for matches to the patterns ../YY/.. and ../YY/MM/.. Also honors your localization options.

• Category Matching

  parse_cats=“yes” defaults to “no”

  Adds url segment matching to system categories. Great if you’re using category_url_titles extensively in your site paths.

• Seperators

  bread_sep=”>” defaults to “»”

  Change the default separator to anything you please

• CSS Class

  css_class=“bready” defaults to “breadcrumb”

  Customize the <ul> class attribute

• CSS ID

  css_id=“breadcrumb_nav” defaults to none

  Add a unique id to the generated <ul>

• Intro Text

  intro_text=“Breadcrumb : “ defaults to “You are here : “

  Customize the intro text for the breadcrumb

• Show a Specific Breadcrumb

  uri=”{different_uri}”

  Show the breadcrumb for a different uri

To use these extra options, either pass them along with the standard tag like this :

{exp:jb_breadcrumb extra_paramater="value"}

or (my preferred method) add the options to your global variables (path.php etc).

Installation

For EE1.6.x place the file pi.jb_breadcrumb.php, from the EE1 folder into you’re system/plugins folder. For EE2.x place the folder jb_breadcrumb from the EE2 folder in your third_party folder.

Support

Any extra feature requests or support issues should be sent to hi@jo3l.net.

Changelog

2.3

Fixed an offset bug

2.2

Added some new tags

2.1

Reorganized logic for better performance and got rid of an unnecessary sql query

2.0

EE2.x compatible release

1.3

Filter weblogs/channel option

1.2

Added extra optional parameters (css class and id)

1.1

Basic Fixes

1.0

Initial Release