Thursday, July 8, 2010

Dynamic Breadcrumbs?!

Have you ever been in a situation where one of the business requirements were breadcrumbs? Most people would answer yes. The funny thing is everyone you talk to, doesn't really have a good solution to handling the little trail of bread.

My current situation was a little more challenging in the sense that I needed dynamic breadcrumbs that would work for fixed pages as well as Cms controlled pages. Cms pages that use Url aliasing. Attempts to use .Net server code to build the breadcrumbs were successful until Url aliasing was involved.

The solution. A jQuery plugin. I searched for two days for a viable solution to dynamic breadcrumbs. Unfortunately there weren't any that I could find. The internet was however, littered with breadcrumb plugins that make your breadcrumbs look cool, of have funky drop down menus. None of them dynamically built a simple trail automatically.

I decided to write my own plugin called: jQuery Dynamic Breadcrumbs!

Creative? I know. Sometimes I even amaze myself. The project is hosted on Google code at jQuery Dynamic Breadcrumbs

The basic idea is using a nicely formatted folder structure/url aliasing. Creating a Url that is easy for a visitor to understand should be more than enough of an indicator that you don't need breadcrumbs, but some people just love the things.

1 comment:

  1. Just need to update your code to work with jquery 1.4.3

    the old way doesn't work anymore, we changed it to:

    location.pathname

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