Navigation Breadcrumb

[gene]

Can I put navigation breadcrumb in my shopsite store? It will help my store in terms of navigation.

[BDMILLS]

I know this is an old posting but I JUST joined and in looking them over this one struck me as worthy of an updated request support.

[Eamon]

This is one of the most requested features by our clients and there is no simple solution for it.

There is always the hack where you code into your Product and Page templates a Custom Field, where you enter in HTML code that generates your breadcrumb on a page by page basis. Every product and Page in your store would then have it's own Breadcrumb at the top.

We've developed a solution to generate Breadcrumbs dynamically so you don't have to enter it for every page or product, and it works in 90% of all situations. It uses an algorithm based on the Page assigned to Pages, and Products assigned to Pages, as well as allows you to have the Product assigned to multiple pages and it still works.

You can see it in action at readdemo.readinstyle.com/catalog/Eyebobs.aspx

This is a development site, so when the site goes live the URL will change to www.readinstyle.com

As for the benefit of Breadcrumbs, it's HUGE! Not only does it help navigation but also is a huge bonus for Search Engine Optimization, especially if you're using templates where the Breadcrumb link is the first links the search engines see. It's a wonderful way to build an internal link structure.

[BDMILLS]

WOW!!

Please pardon mi ignorance, but when something this exciting is shown to work (even if not 100% pure)... will you share it with others? or do you see it as a competitive advantage?

Thanks,

-- Ben Mills, Charity Village Mall

[Eamon]

I love the enthusiasm! We think it's really cool but it's always great to see that other people do as well. Thanks

As for making it available, at this point we're selling it to our clients who have developed their ShopSite stores with us, using our Custom Commerce solution or our Sprout Commerce solution.

We're not selling it to everyone because there are some technical requirements from a custom template, and hosting standpoint. We know our clients have them but can't be sure for the general public.

If you're interested, feel free to contact us through our form on our site and I can evaluate your site and see if I can hook you up with it.

[extragear]

Greetings:

We are redesigning our site (with the help of a designer) and the question of breadcrumb navigation came about. (We all know the benefits of having it.)


I reviewed the forum (as well as this posting), cookbook and help documents.

From what I can tell one way to implement breadcrumb navigation is to:

1. Edit the page and product templates so they use one of the page or product extra fields. Place the field where you want the navigation to appear.
2. Create the css to format the field.
3. Go through each page and product and enter the appropriate navigation path.

In general, is this correct?

If so then,

1. What would be a example of a code you would insert into say a product extra field?
2. Any tips on speeding up the creation of the appropriate links for each page and product? I know that some pages as well as some products would share the same navigation breadcrumb. Maybe setting up a spreadsheet with parts of the code in it?

3. What if a page or product could be listed under two different parent pages?

For example, lets say we sold boots. There are fashion boots, winter boots, work boots. You could also break down your offerings by brand name.
So you could have a page or product logically follow two different parent pages.

Example, Parent Page is Work boots, then subpage could be steel toed work boots, then on the steel toed page you would list all steel toed work boots.

But you could also have a Parent Page of Redwing Boots (thats a brand), then a subpage of Redwing steel toed on which you could list all Redwing steel toed work boots.

So in this case you can have Redwing steel toed work boots assigned to more than one page.

Therefore my question is, which path would you choose for the product that can be assigned to two different pages?

Thanks

Tim
Belden Motosport

[Eamon]

Hi,

The first way you've described integrating breadcrumbs is how everyone does it with ShopSite, but it requires a lot manual work, and it doesn't work well if you start to rename/delete pages or products.

Since this way is completely manual, the person entering the breadcrumbs decides the breadcrumb path.

With our solution, it's 100% automatic, the breadcrumbs get created automatically. With our solution we also define priority paths/pages so in the case where the product is displayed on more than 1 page, the breadcrumb knows which page series to follow to automatically create the breadcrumb.

The result is the same, the product detail page would always have the same breadcrumb no matter which path the visitor took to get there, since there is only one page per product, but that breadcrumb would be automatically generated based on priority rules we've setup with our add-on.

Hopefully this answers your question.

[existdissolve]

I'm rolling a new ShopSite site soon, and I've utilized Lexicon's mysql module so that I can leverage PHP to create the breadcrumbs on the fly. The big disadvantage of this method, of course, is that you have to move quite a bit away from the ShopSite templates...however, I think this is the direction that SS is going to have to move in the future to keep up with the flexibility and customization-potential of more modern shopping cart software that is available, so perhaps the "drawback" now is an actual step in the right direction.

[Eamon]

Existdissolve: That is definitely a way to do it, but we believe keeping as much inside the ShopSite architecture as possible, so the site can always benefit from the new features that ShopSite adds regularly.

Our solution works within the ShopSite Custom Templates, ShopSite still generates all the pages.