I recently had to improve the breadcrumbs situation on one of my projects. Until now, breadcrumb definition were sprinkled across the controllers. While that was okay for a while, the current breadcrumbs have become a bit more complex, and I wanted to get them out of the controllers. One option would’ve been to put them into the model, but seriously, who does that? Plus, I have a lot of breadcrumbs that are not exactly related to a model, and if they are, it’s not always an ActiveRecord model.
Instead I wanted a simple configuration file. I started out with a combination of arrays and hashes put into global variables, but that turned out to be a mess. What I really wanted, was something like this:
There, much nicer. In the view, all I really wanted to do was, instead of manually assembling all the crumbs in place:
<%= crumbs %>
What evolved naturally was a simple API and with a potential plugin, so there you go. It’s called Crumble and lives on the GitHubs. You can read all the glory details on its usage in the README. I’m sure to add some more stuff, but for the moment I wanted to keep it simple, and have it support the needs of the project. If you have something to add, fork away.