Breadcrumbs don't fit the Drupal model. Turn them off.
Breadcrumbs are a hierarchal paradigm. Drupal is not at all hierarchal (though book and taxonomy try to impose some hierarchy).
So i recommend to turn breadcrumbs off.
1) They never make intuitive sense to users. Why, right now, at the top of this page, it says "Home » content » create content". In my mind I am in "Home >> Forum >> Usability feedback >> New entry".
2) From page to page as you do stuff, the associated breadcrumbs change wildly and bear little resemblance to what you are doing or where you have been.
3) There is no value in walking back up the link path. It seldom takes you somewhere relevant to what you are doing
4) Most of all they often don't shed any light on what you are doing right now
This isn't a criticism of Drupal, or of the breadcrumb functionality. It is the very nature of Drupal that breadcrumbs don't work with it.
Sort of
They can work on certain Drupal sites, but as you've noticed Drupal can be far more flexible than what can be matched by breadcrumbs.
Sometimes I use them, sometimes I don't. But I agree, that the moment they start becoming difficult - just forget about them. It's not worth the effort to try and make them fit a non hierarchical site.
--
Anton
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I don't know about turning them off
I don't know about turning them completely off... but I definitely agree that the breadcrumbs aren't always left intuitively. Several users at my site have complained that breadcrumbs are a bit confusing...
Perhaps we need some admin options for how breadcrumbs should show, rather than turning them off.
Drupal model is what you make it
Drupal by default lets you create a site as a non-hierarchical web of pages. But the 'Drupal model' is what you make it, really. It is certainly possible to create highly structured, hierarchical sites, where the breadcrumbs are meaningful on all pages - the category module (among other modules) is trying to make this easier. If breadcrumbs aren't appropriate to your site, then turning them off is as simple as removing them from your theme's main template file (which is page.tpl.php, if you're using PHPTemplate). But they are an important feature of Drupal, and removing them altogether is IMO a very bad idea.
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Turning them off is simple, but turning them on is not
I happen to be using Drupal to create and manage a very hierarchical site, with some random access capability always necessary. And so for this user navigation, breadcrumbs are essential. More importantly though, I think, my SEO people tell me that I need to have breadcrumbs that lead to the current page, not to the previous page. I have no problem at all from a usability perspective if there is a self-referent link on a given page; it doesn't bother me at all.
The issue is, why is it so hard to turn on? I have built a very hierarchical site with effective use of menus and url aliases. But in order to get effective breadcrumbs, from everything I'm reading, I have to install and learn how to configure not one, but two new modules, taxonomy and taxonomy_breadcrumbs, which just seems absurd and bizarre. And in addition (or in place of??) I may need to install PHPtemplate? I certainly don't want to start messing around with whole templates for the site.
I don't know why there wouldn't just be a switch within Drupal that says "include self-referent links in breadcrumbs" or some such, and be done with it. I am under extreme duress trying to figure out how to make this work, on a very tight time schedule, and I must say I am not appreciating the nuanced reasons for it not being there by default.
If someone could please spell out, in a very simple and direct way, and without making assumptions about what other modules I may have installed, how to, (a), replace the "home" term with the domain name, and (b), include the current page as the last link in the breadcrumb chain? For this, I would be deeply indebted.
I'm running through this issue on
Drupal 6 right now. I'm now using the menu breadcrumb module for this. I don't know how to change home, but at least this will give you the menu breadcrumb trail.
path module
I have found that aliasing with the path module allows you to build out nodes that bread crumb the way you would expect. Not everyone needs this behavior so the flexibility it useful.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Never is a bit strong.
Never is a bit strong. While reading this thread, they said Home » Forum » General » Usability feedback, which not only makes perfect sense, but is useful. When reading the handbook, they're even more useful, since the tree is both deeper and wider.
But the Drupal model isn't relevant here. That's like saying you can't have a round room on a house because lumber is rectangular. Or that you shouldn't display more than one node on a page because they're not stored that way in the database. Drupal is just the infrastructure tool set. Every web site has its own navigation model, and it's important for Drupal to have a variety of tools to support those various models.
assigning a default site vocabulary
I think it would be good to be able to assign a vocabulary as a 'site default', that could be used as a structuring tool for a website - linking in with the breadcrumb and the primary/secondary/(tertiary)/etc menus, and even possibly the path alias.
You know it's a cool idea :)
Drupal can be hierarchical
> Drupal is not at all hierarchical (though book and taxonomy try to impose some hierarchy).
I respectfully disagree. Drupal can be hierarchical and I like using taxonomy to create a hierarchical site. If you want your breadcrumbs to reflect the taxonomy hierarchy, try the taxonomy_breadcrumb module.
The Category module ....
allows one to create perfectly hierarchical content, doesn't it?
how does one turn them off globally?
how do you globally disable breadcrumbs?
Take them out of the theme
Take them out of the theme template.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Any 4.6 solutions?
Category and taxonomy_breadcrumb look like great modules. Are there any options for those of us still on 4.6, however (aside from upgrading, of course)?
Taxonomy_context
taxonomy_context does a pretty good job of making breadcrumbs out of your 4.6 taxonomy terms.
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Great but...
How do you turn it off when using Chamelon - there is no page.tpl.php file?
Thanks!
Accessibility Accessibility
Plain PHP themes
Info on plain PHP themes (eg Chameleon):
http://drupal.org/node/11795
http://drupal.org/node/55126
Basically you'll need to override some function(s). You could either override the theme function that outputs breadcrumbs by getting it to output nothing, or override the theme function for the page so that it no longer adds breadcrumbs to the output. The first option would probably be the best for future maintenance I reckon - although I've never used plain PHP theme myself ;)
The theme functions in question:
http://api.drupal.org/api/4.7/function/theme_breadcrumb
http://api.drupal.org/api/4.7/function/theme_page
--
Anton
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I disagree strongly with your premise.
I disagree strongly with your premise. Issues with breadcrums in Drupal are not because of the nature of Drupal, they are because of the lack of a good breadcrumb architecture in Drupal. We should try to improve the architecture, not "throw the baby out with the bathwater."
FYOI, Jakob Nielsen, well-known web usability expert reports Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful in April 2007.
based on nodes, not path traveled
I don't like how the breadcrumbs are generated based on the node, because many times a node has more than one category or whatever, and so Drupal just randomly (or perhaps by lowest ID) chooses the one parent to put in the breadcrumb.
IMO breadcrumbs should be determed by the path the user took to get somewhere (unless linking directly to a page in which case you need to do something else).