On the Pineco.de site they've posted a tutorial showing how to create a lightweight breadcrumb system for use in a Laravel application. It makes use of a "view composer" to help translate the current path into a matching "crumb".

Breadcrumbs are important in web applications. But most of the time, it’s not the easiest to track the different levels in your URL and generate breadcrumbs from it. Now we give it a try with a simple yet elegant solution.

The post starts by describing the basic concept and the article that inspired their finished product. They needed a dynamic solution that could translate the URL to a breadcrumb list. They created an array with a crumb-to-URL relationship and made use of Laravel's view composer handling to create the collection of crumbs from the current request information. Finally they include the partial view that can be used to render the results, looping through them and outputting each as a link.

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).