Instant Breadcrumbs adds a breadcrumb trail to your WordPress blog's primary navigation menu. No theme editing required!
Instant Breadcrumbs adds a breadcrumb trail to your WordPress blog’s primary navigation menu. No theme editing required!
Including a breadcrumb trail on your site not only makes it easier for visitors to navigate your site, but also allows
search engines to better explore your blog and include the breadcrumb information in rich snippet data in search
results. Many breadcrumb plugins exist, but normally require either theme editing, or use of a theme that is already
customized to include the breadcrumb function. In addition, editing the theme is usually followed by some CSS
styling to make the breadcrumb trail match the overall ‘look’ of the site.
Instant Breadcrumbs takes a different approach. Since breadcrumbs are a navigation aid, the generated trail is
automatically added to the front of your existing primary navigation menu. This allows it to not only function
straight out of the box with a large number of themes, but also use the existing styling of your primary navigation
menu.
A quick overview of Instant Breadcrumbs features:
Visit the Plugin Blog Page if you have a comment or suggestion for the next update of the plugin!
If Instant Breadcrumbs is useful to you, please consider making a small contribution via Flattr to help support
the continued development and improvement of this plugin, or leave a review at the WordPress Plugin Directory.
The Instant Breadcrumbs plugin is currently translated into the following languages:
Spanish translation provided by Andrew Kurtis of WebHostingHub.
Serbian translation provided by Ogi Djuraskovic of FirstSiteGuide.
All other translations courtesy of the continued hard work of the WP-Translations team. This plugin is proud to be a part of the
WP-Translations community. If you would like to make translation contributions, please visit the translation dashboard on Transifex.
Banner image is Trail of (gluten-free) bread crumbs by Kat Selvocki and
used here under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
instant-breadcrumbs
directory to the /wp-content/plugins/
directory;<?php instant_breadcrumb(); ?>
into your theme.true
as a second parameter if youA screenshot of Instant Breadcrumbs generated on a blog post in TwentyFourteen, showing the breadcrumb trail for the current post, including the post category. This is without any theme editing;
The exact same blog in TwentyTwelve, no theme editing;
... and in TwentyThirteen, again without theme editing;
The same page in TwentyFourteen on a smaller display, showing the breadcrumb trail automatically styles with the navigation menu;
The breadcrumb trail for a page that already appears in the nav menu, reusing the existing link.
Instant Breadcrumbs is designed to work with “generic” WordPress blog themes. In other words, these
are basic themes which have a header that calls wp_nav_menu
in their header to include a
menu (or a menu based on your static pages, if no menu has been defined). The default themes that
ship with each WordPress installation are good examples, as are most “general purpose” blogging
themes. The plugin is intended to provide easy breadcrumb functionality for basic blogging, and will
attempt to identify the first menu on the web page.
Instant Breadcrumbs attempts to find the first menu in your theme, and add the trail there. For some
themes the menu may be difficult to identify, or the first menu is not the ideal position. In these
cases, you may manually specify a theme location in the Instant Breadcrumbs settings. The value here
should match the theme_location
in the relevant wp_nav_menu
call in your theme header. Leave this
blank to allow Instant Breadcrumbs to automatically find the first one.
If your web site is highly customized, and your theme contains its own custom code to generate
menus or navigation, then it’s likely that Instant Breadcrumbs may not be called when your site
is displayed. In this case, you can revert to theme editing and call instant_breadcrumb()
manually
to insert the breadcrumb trail at an appropriate location in your theme. You can optionally insert
HTML between the breadcrumb elements, and you should perform your own CSS styling. Alternatively,
you may insert the supplied widget in an appropriate location.
The automatic addition of breadcrumbs to the main menu is not for everyone. It may not suit your
existing menu items, or perhaps you would prefer a more traditional breadcrumb display somewhere
else in your layout. The automatic mode is the default in Instant Breadcrumbs, but you may disable
it in the Breadcrumbs settings page (under Appearance). If you are using the widget method, or
manually editing your template PHP, it is recommended you disable automatic mode.
The plugin is designed to keep your settings from one installed version to the next. If the upgraded
version has new settings, they will be set to sensible defaults. You should verify these new settings
after an upgrade. Your old settings should still be preserved.
Instant Breadcrumbs will reuse menu items wherever possible, for example when viewing a page that is
already in the top-level menu. However it cannot reuse a menu item link if doing so would mean the
generated breadcrumbs are no longer in order. The usual example of this is if the home page already
appears in the primary menu. The generated breadcrumb trail requires the home link to be first. The
easiest workaround for this is simply to customize your menu so the home page is not included a
second time.
The Instant Breadcrumbs plugin adds the CSS class ib-crumb
to the li
element of any breadcrumbs in
the menu, and ib-lastcrumb
to the last link in the breadcrumb trail representing the current page.
Furthermore, the class ib-added
is added to the li
element of new menu items created by the plugin,
and ib-edited
to existing menu items. These may be styled in your theme’s style.css
should for
instance you would like breadcrumb items to be highlighted in a different color.
Some useful examples: .ib-crumb {display:inline;}
will display your breadcrumb trail in a single line
if you are using PHP or the widget to display the trail. A more complex one is .ib-crumb+.ib-crumb:before {content:">";}
which will add the additional arrow as a separator between consecutive breadcrumbs.
If your post title includes these characters, be sure to escape them correctly (for example
as <
, >
, and &
). Otherwise they may be rendered incorrectly at any time they may appear on the Web
page, including in the breadcrumb trail. This is nothing particular about Instant Breadcrumbs, but all
breadcrumb generators, and Web pages in general, behave similarly. As of version 1.2, you may include HTML markup in
your post titles, such as <em>for emphasis</em>
, and the Instant Breadcrumb trail will optionally
include it in the breadcrumb as well. This option is enabled by default. Disabling it will use
text only in each crumb.
show_on_front
is set to page
. Better for multilingual sites. (Thanks to luoshiben).wp_nav_menu
item styling.