Easy WordPress Breadcrumbs

Your site should always be as usable as possible and site navigation is a big part of that. Aside from your standard sidebars and top navigation, it’s always a good idea to include a breadcrumb to let users track their way back to the home page. Of course there are lots of plugins you can use to insert this, but why use a plugin, when you can do it just as easily on your own.

Here’s the code that you’ll need to add to your functions.php file:

//breadcrumb function
function YLcrumbs() {
 if ((is_page() && !is_front_page()) || is_home() || is_category() || is_single()) {
 echo '<ul id="breadcrumbs">';
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_bloginfo('url').'">Home</a>&raquo;</li>';
 $post_ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post);
 if ($post_ancestors) {
 $post_ancestors = array_reverse($post_ancestors);
 foreach ($post_ancestors as $crumb)
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink($crumb).'">'.get_the_title($crumb).'</a>&raquo;</li>';
 }
 if (is_category() || is_single()) {
 $category = get_the_category();
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_category_link($category[0]->cat_ID).'">'.$category[0]->cat_name.'</a>&raquo;</li>';
 }
 if (!is_category())
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink().'">'.get_the_title().'</a></li>';
 echo '</ul>';
 }
}

Then, in your template, wherever you want to display your breadcrumb, you’d add the following:

<? YLcrumbs(); ?>

Note that the function generates a breadcrumb in a UL element, so your CSS might look something like this:

#breadcrumbs {padding: 10px 0;margin:0;}
#breadcrumbs li {display:inline;padding: 0 10px 0 0;}

That would give you a  list of LI elements in a row. Then you can style it up further as you require.

Have you used this somewhere? Leave a link in the comments to your implementation of this breadcrumb system.