New on his blog today Wenbert Del Rosario has posted a tutorial about getting the Zend_Navigation helper to work in your application and correctly handle making/updating breadcrumbs as you navigate around the site.
In the latest release of Zend Framework (1.8.1 as of this writing), there is a new built-in view helper to render your breadcrumb needs. There is a section in the documentation that tells us how to use it. But I got a little confused when I tried to make it work. So, here is a short example on how I made my breadcrumbs work using the new breadcrumb view helper from Zend Framework.
He includes the code to create the breadcrumb trail - making a Zend_Navigation container and defining the structure of the site inside. Displaying the correct links is then just a call to the breadcrumbs() method on the object (with the ability to set depth and to set the last item in the list as a link or not).