Hansel & Gretel: Fine-Tuned Breadcrumb Generator

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Where The Heck Am I?

Let’s face it: breadcrumbs are an integral part of websites these days. They give an immediate sense of hierarchy to your visitors and allow users to backtrack through your site to (hopefully) find more content. WordPress simplifies structuring sites how ever it seems reasonable, but it takes a bit more effort to generate breadcrumbs for all the different types of posts, and pages, and taxonomies, and archives, and … you get the idea.

But there are already plugins for that, aren’t there?

Sure! And a lot of them work really well for simple sites with simple hierarchies, but many of them fall short in one way or the other:

Want to use the new semantic <nav> element?
Nope sorry, all they have are <p>‘s or <ul>‘s.

Need to control the classes or IDs of the crumbs?
Yep, nope; their wrapper has a fixed class of breadcrumbs though…I hope that’s all you need.

Uh…okay what about custom taxonomies?
You already know the answer to this question…

And custom post types?
Better hope they’re hierarchical!

Should I even bother mentioning rich snippets/microdata?
Haven’t found one yet.

Okay fine, but what makes you think yours is any better?

It might be obvious (considering the previous section) that this plugin seeks to address all the customizability problems with the existing breadcrumb plugin environment while still keeping it as easy to use as possible (read: HAG_Breadcrumbs();, done!). It’s as simple as that. Hopefully it can live up to your expectations!

Features

The following features are currently available unless otherwise specifed.

• Simple Installation
  Upload the plugin, activate via the WordPress admin, and drop the function where you want the breadcrumbs to appear in your template. Done!

• Fine-Tuned Control
  H&G works right out of the box, but oftentimes we want custom control. Nearly every aspect of the breadcrumbs rendering can be changed a’la the myriad of options available.

• Microdata Integration
  H&G by default includes the microdata format for a WebPage’s breadcrumbs, a format that is jointly supported by Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex.

• Full Markup Control
  Choose any element to wrap your breadcrumbs, including optional class(es) or ID attributes. Likewise, you can include prefix and suffix content right inside the wrapper element tags for further control.

• Template Hierarchy Based Rendering
  H&G utilizes the WordPress Template Hierarchy to determine which crumbs to show, including that elusive Comments Popup Window everybody (read: nobody) uses! This means, regardless of your theme, Hansel & Gretel will follow WP’s lead about the content on the page.

• Custom Post Types & Taxonomies
  Never worry about how breadcrumbs behave across your fancy new post types and taxonomies. H&G accounts for hierarchical and non-hierarchical types, whether or not they have an archive page, and also provides options to override breadcrumb display for individual post types if desired.

• Home & Last Crumbs
  H&G allows full control in showing home breadcrumbs and even allows for customized Front Page versus Blog Home Page templates. Likewise, the last, current page crumb has equal control depending on the needs of your theme.

• Made for Theme Developers
  Hansel and Gretel was made by theme developers for theme developers. The default options and degree of customizability were all considered by our team of experienced WP developers to make sense right out of the box, with as little further customization as possible. Give it a try and let us know what you think. We all want H&G to be the simplest and smartest breadcrumb plugin you’ll ever use! To contribute to the development of this plugin, fork our repo over on GitHub.