By tgliedt on

Someone must have done this before, but after days of searching, I've not found anyone who documented it well enough that I can figure it out - so I'll ask here for a lead. Drupal 6 comes so close to doing it 'right'. Here's what I'm looking for. Menus are something like:

A
  a1
    2008
       topic 1 (node=666)
       topic 2 (node=689)

As I navigate the menus, A -> a1 -> 2008 I see breadcrumbs 'Home -> A -> a1 -> 2008' show up, exactly as I want.

Now I click on 'topic 1' which is a 'page' and breadcrumbs change to 'Home'. Two minutes later want to go to 'topic 2', but I can't remember how to get there. Adding links in the text of the document seem a particular poor way to overwhelm this.

I tried the module 'Custom Breadcrumbs', but had zero idea what the heck to do with the configuration of it. A working example might have made all the difference.

I tried the module 'Menu Breadcrumbs' and after a little configuration, it ALMOST worked, giving me a breadcrumb 'Home -> Topic 1', losing the important part of the previous breadcrumbs.

What I want, of course, is 

    'Home -> A -> a1 -> 2008' 
or better
   ' Home -> A -> a1 -> 2008 -> Topic 1'

How have people made this work in Drupal 6? TIA

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

If topic 1 is in your menu, then the breadcrumbs should reflect that.
Are you sure topic 1 is in your menu?

-----------------------------------------
Joep
CompuBase, Drupal, websites and webdesign

tgliedt’s picture

tgliedt commented

No, 'topic 1' was not in the menu... that would make for thousands of menu entries.

Rather 'Home -> A -> a1 -> 2008' gets to a page which has links to a bunch of other pages. Clicking on one of these (e.g. 'Topic 1') gets to the material to be viewed. When that happens the breadcrumbs ('Home -> A -> a1 -> 2008') disappear and I'm left with 'Home' -> 'Topic 1'... making it much more difficult to get back to '2008' to choose another page.

That's the behavior I want - that is, I want breadcrumbs to reflect the path I used to get to a page. How have other sites dealt with this?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Which sites? I am not kidding but I have not seen one!
There are several posts about this issue and I want to know a solution too!

-----------------------------------------
Joep
CompuBase, Drupal, websites and webdesign

jonjonz’s picture

jonjonz commented

I believe that breadcrumbs grab links from where in the menu structure a node appears.

When a node is created, and the default menu entry is accepted, then that is what will be the breadcrumb.

Experiment with creating menus that include the nodes you are concerned about, that reflect the breadcrumb path you desire to get what you want is my suggestion.

tgliedt’s picture

tgliedt commented

I understand that breadcrumbs follow the menu structure.

If I actually would use menus for everything, then I'll have menus numbered in the thousands for the site. It very quickly becomes unusable with anything approaching even a couple of hundred menus. So I settled for menus to get me to lists of documents organized by year.

As you know when I click on a link in some page for year '2005', the breadcrumbs are lost - hence my question on this topic.

Another way to approach it is to ask how to organize a site which has many thousands of documents and keep breadcrumbs intact? The documents are organized into a few top level categories. Each of these contain another half dozen subcategories. Each of the subcategories generally are organized by year (between 6 and 20 years so far) and finally each year contains between 12 and 50 documents.

Putting all of this into menus results in something that is pretty well unmanageable for the user. I'm open to a better way.

This also brings up the gross tediousness of adding those menus. The flashy javascript that allows you to drag and drop menus around makes for an almost unusable system of menus management - but that's another topic, unless I end up needing to create thousands of menu entries.

Thanks for your response.

starkos’s picture

starkos commented

I realize I'm coming ridiculously late to this party, but wanted to throw in my $0.02 in case someone found this thread in the future. I think the solution you are looking for is to set up a taxonomy instead of a menu, and then use one of the taxonomy breadcrumb modules. You will have a taxonomy tree that mirrors your current menu tree, but rather than creating a new menu item for each topic you would just assign the topic a taxonomy term. HTH.