Wrestling with Drupal Breadcrumbs

Since I first installed Drupal I've had issues with the menu system and breadcrumb trails. Out of the box they don't do what I'd expect them to do.

For those who don't know what a breadcrumb trail is: look above this post - it's the links that show you the path from the home page to the current page (it should say "Home > Blog > Wrestling with Drupal Breadcrumbs"). They allow you to move back to the parent pages of the current page easily.

I have a page called "What is software watermarking?" which originally had the breadcrumb trail "Home -> What is software watermarking?"; this is what Drupal produces out of the box but it's not what I want/expect the trail to be. I'd much prefer the trail to be "Home > Research > Software Watermarking > What is software watermarking?" - it easily allows you to access the rest of my research, for example.

After a week of Googling and installing & configuring several breadcrumb trail modules I've finally cracked it. I found the Custom Breadcrumbs module allows me to do exactly what I want. In conjuction with the module I also made several of my tags hierarchical, like so:

• Programming
  • Java
  • PHP
  • HTML
  • SQL
• Research
  • Decompilation
  • Obfuscation
  • Software Watermarking
  • Presentations
  • Papers
  • Conferences

I created the "Research" tag specifically in order to give the research tags a parent; I hadn't tagged anything with "Research".

Now that the tags are hierarchical the Custom Breadcrumbs module automagically generates intuitive breadcrumb trails, for example "Home > Programming > Java". So anything tagged with "Java" will display that breadcrumb.

As there is nothing tagged with "Research" the breadcrumb link led not to my research page but to an empty list of items tagged with "Research". In order to get around this I added a rule into the Custom Breadcrumbs module which contained the correct path to the research page (content/research).

One other rule that I added to the module was to enable the blog breadcrumb trail to display "Home > Blog > post title" instead of "Home > post title".

Here's a comparison of breadcrumb modules for Drupal - I tried them all and they did some but not all of what I want, or maybe I was just being dumb at using them. Either way, the Custom Breadcrumbs module rules.

Talking of breadcrumbs, I had a Chicken Temptation sub at Subway today; it was yummy.