About Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the hints about how this page was reached that you find in the green bar at the top of the middle panel on each page. Breadcrumbs are fairly broken in Drupal V5. Our software contractor did a couple of patches for panel pages and views which Drupal didn't handle at all.

However there are two types of people in the world, back people and non-back people. I am a back person. I always navigate by hitting the back button and going back to where I was last when I hit the end of a string of forward motion. So for me a breadcrumb trail of where I have been makes the most sense. Non-back people always navigate by going forward following links they see on the screen. For them a breadcrumb trail that shows the logical path to a page is better. This is in general hard to construct because webs are webs, not strict hierarchies, and pages have multiple logical ways of getting there.

If you arrive at a page from some external search engine there is not enough information to construct any useful breadcrumb. Thus it is good for most pages to have some links within the content portion that lead to other related pages, typically higher in the tree, so that people who arrive from a search engine know a little bit about how to find this page by site navigation, for example, in the donation tree, the Donate Now page needs a link to back to the motivation page, just as that page needs a link to Donate Now.