PHP "breadcrumb trail"?

[Anon]

Hi!

I need to implement something like Jakob Neilson talks about in his web usability book. I'd like to make it dynamically generated, but I'm new to programming and PHP, so I'm not sure where to start. Basically if the navigation through the site goes page1.php, page2.php, page3.php, etc, on the each individual page I'd like to see a trail for where I've been. Such as:

Page 1 > Page 2 > Page 3 > Etc.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to start implementing this, or if anyone has code to do this, please let me know!

Thanks!

[Anon]

just pass a variable, easily done with sessions and keep adding to it.

session_start();

if (!isset($site))
{
$site[] = $PHP_SELF;
session_register("site");
}

foreach($site as $pos => $val)
echo "<a href=$val> $val </a>\n";

That should work. untested though. If you dont have alot of expereice with sessions, take a look on

www.php.net/manual/ref.session.php
or
www.phpbuilder.com/columns/mattias20000312.php3

Although neither are by any means definitive.

if you have compiled php yourself be sure to enable

--enable-trans-sid

It will make sessions avalibe to users without cookies.

Chris Lee

[Anon]

Thanks Chris, I'll give it a go.

I've got the site pretty modular right now with most of the code in a common.inc file. Can all of your code be in that common file (with the exception of the "echo" line?

Aaron

[Anon]

Aaron, I applaud your attention to Jakob Nielsen's functional design principles. However -- and I don't think Nielsen would disagree with me on this point -- I
urge you to be careful that your breadcrumb trails reflect site structure and not just the user's clickstream history (which may be random and confusing).

Take a look at Yahoo for a good example; the breadcrumb trails reflect Yahoo's ontology.

Let me try to explain this another way.

Breadcrumb trails should help the user understand his or her location within a coherent information space.

Concentrate on ontology first, and then make the breadcrumb trails reflect that.

You may (and probably should) overlay network navigation on top of ontological hierarchy. Bread crumbs should not reflect network navigation.

[Anon]

I completely agree Steve. I want the breadcrumb trail to reflect the actual site hierarchy and not the users "click path".

[Anon]

Here is a snippet of the breadcrumb function that I added to the Prattle bulletin board system. It may be informative, but of course it is pretty closely tied to the Prattle database schema. You can see Prattle in action at http://stonemountain.yi.org/

function breadcrumbs($id)
{
global $roomid;
global $db;
global $prattle_rooms;
global $breadcrumbtrail;
$result = mysql_db_query($db, "select * from $prattle_rooms where
roomid='$id'");
$room = mysql_fetch_object($result);
if ($id == $roomid)
$breadcrumbtrail = $room->title;
else
$breadcrumbtrail = "<a href=\"prattle.php?roomid=$room->roomid\

    if ($room->roomparent) breadcrumbs($room->roomparent);

    return $breadcrumbtrail;
    }

[Anon]

I place nearly all my code in .inc files.

index.php
<?
include("index.inc");
echo "$fname<br>\n";
echo "$lname<br>\n";
echo "$email<br>\n";
?>

index.inc
<?
$fname = "Chris";
$lname = "Lee";
$email = "[e-mail]";
?>

The reason I do this is simply I find it easier for our web designers to edit the index.php files if there is little code in there. They get scared when they see loops and such.

You can put echo's in your .inc's too if you really wanted to.

Chris Lee

[Anon]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. Just for the record, here's what we finally did.

All the code went in the common.inc file. This snippet starts it out:

<?php

$breadcrumb = array(
"children" => "Children's Ministry",
"youth" => "Youth Ministry",
"newsletter" => "Newsletter",
"home" => "Home Page"
);

function commonHeader ($title) {

global $breadcrumb;

?>

Then, later on in the commonHeader section each page gets:

<?php

	$urlstring = getenv('REQUEST_URI');
$urlstring = preg_replace("/^\/|\/$/", "", $urlstring);
$urlstring = preg_replace("/^zion\/home\/?/", "", $urlstring);
echo "<a href=\"/zion/home/\">Zion Home</a>";
$crumbs = preg_split("/\//", $urlstring);
$j = sizeof($crumbs);
if ($urlstring != "") {
	for ($i=0; $i<$j; $i++) {
		$crumb = $crumbs[$i];
		if (($crumbname = $breadcrumb[$crumb]) == "")
			$crumbname = $crumb;
		if ($i == $j - 1) {
			/* Current Page */
			echo " --> $title";
		}
		else {
			preg_match("/.*$crumb\/?/", getenv('REQUEST_URI'), $thisurl);
			echo " --> <a href=\"$thisurl[0]\">", $crumbname, "</a>";
		}

	}
}
echo "<br><br>\n\n";

}

function commonFooter () {
?>

This goes a little over my head, but my programmer friend tells me this was the best way to do it in our instance.

Thanks,
Aaron

[Anon]

I'm using this breadcrumb-navi:
http://www.evolt.org/article/Breadcrumbs_for_PHP_Lovers/17/4455/

works perfectly!!

[hartnell]

The code above may produce errors when your directory name is a part of another directory name; ie test>testlevel2>testlevel3 etc...

I found by setting a boundary on the following line the code works as it should.

preg_match("/.+\b$crumb\b\//", getenv('REQUEST_URI'), $thisurl);

-j