December 31st, 2019

Breadcrumb NavXT 6.4.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Holy incremental improvements Batman! This second feature release of 2019 changes the way private posts and non-hierarchical taxonomies are handled. As part of these changes, a new filter was added bcn_show_post_private. Additionally, the %link% template tag is now allowed in the “unlinked” breadcrumb templates. Lastly, how the Media post type settings are handles changed. Previously, it was referred to as “Attachments” within the Breadcrumb NavXT settings page. Now, this post type is referred to by its actual name (Media) and additional settings are available for it in the settings page.

bcn_show_post_private Filter

Beginning in 6.4.0, the default behavior for private posts has changed. If a parent of a post has the published status of private, it no longer will be included in the breadcrumb trail (Breadcrumb NavXT will skip over it). While this was deemed the most appropriate behavior, some users may want the old behavior. To facilitate that, the bcn_show_post_private filter was added in 6.4.0.

bcn_show_type_term_archive Filter

Since 3.9.0, Breadcrumb NavXT has attempted to associate a taxonomy with a post type to include the type archive in the breadcrumb trail. This was not controllable (if the post type had an archive and it was enabled in the settings for that post type, it would show up in the breadcrumb trails for associated taxonomy terms). To allow users to control this behavior, the bcn_show_type_term_archive filter was added in 6.4.0.

Non-Hierarchical Taxonomies

Previously, the use of non-hierarchical taxonomies as the parent for posts was handled in a very different manner than hierarchical taxonomies. This is quite hacky, and incompatible with the newer bcn_display_json_ld() function. To resolve some of these incompatibilities, when a post has onl only a single non-hierarchical term, the hierarchical term codepath will be used. This will result in the same breadcrumb trial being produced, however, it will no longer cause issues with bcn_display_json_ld.

-John Havlik

June 14th, 2019

Seagate 5TB Backup Plus Portable (2019 Edition)

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

Seagate has recently updated their 2.5″ Backup Plus Portable line, redesigning the hard drive’s enclosure. The previous version was somewhat popular for drive shucking due to price, capacity, and ease of shucking. This new model, the STHP5000400, contains a 5TB 5400RPM hard drive in the 15mm tall 2.5″ form-factor. For those looking to inexpensively fill 2.5″ drive bays in a storage server/NAS, this seems to be the only choice.

May 22nd, 2019

Fix Missing Network Controllers on Windows 10 Build 18362 (19H1)

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

After being graced with the latest Windows 10 feature update, Build 18362, both network adapters on my ASRock X370 Taichi motherboard went missing. This was not a simple case of the drivers for the network cards, the Intel Wireless-AC 9260 and Intel I211, not being installed, device manager did not even have a “unknown device” placeholder for either NIC.

Luckily, this was not a hardware issue (failure). Both devices worked once again after rolling back the build 18362 update. However, this is not a long-term solution as Windows 10 is very persistent on nagging users to install feature updates.

As the hardware had not failed, it was on to looking for something missing in the PCIe tree. Unfortunately, Windows 10 does not ship something like lspci as most Linux distributions do. However, there is the Device Management PowerShell utility. With it installed, the following command can be used to collect the PCI tree:

Get-device | where {$_.LocationInfo -like 'PCI bus*'} | select Name, LocationInfo, UINumber > pci_tree.txt

Comparing the PCI tree from before and after the build 18362 update revealed that the “PCI Downstream Switch Ports” on PCI bus 38 and the “PCI Upstream Switch” port on PCI bus 13 were missing (along with the two Intel NICs). On the ASRock X370 Taichi, only the CPU and the chipset contain PCIe switches. Given that NICs are traditionally attached to the chipset, it was time to look at the chipset driver.

Attempting to re-install the latest AMD X370 chipset driver revealed that Windows had downgraded the driver in the feature update—breaking the PCI bus in the process. Fixing the issue was as simple as re-installing the AMD 19.10.0429 chipset driver. After a reboot, both NICs were working one again.

May 3rd, 2019

Breadcrumb NavXT 6.3.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Holy Gutenberg breadcrumb trail block Batman! Originally scheduled for inclusion in Breadcrumb NavXT 6.2, the Breadcrumb Trail Gutenberg Block finally makes an appearance in 6.3. Additionally, changes were made to improve accessibility standards support (both in the settings page and in the breadcrumb trail). Lastly, a bug that caused a PHP error in bcn_breadcrumb_trail::fill() has been fixed.

bcn_display_attribute_array Filter

Back in 6.0, the bcn_display_attributes filter was added to replace the old bcn_li_attributes filter. This was little more than a name change for the filter. Unfortunately, neither filter is easy to use—both require string processing. As an alternative, easier to use filter, bcn_display_attribute_array was added to Breadcrumb NavXT 6.3. This filter works against a key-value pair array of the attributes.

bcn-aria-current Template Tag

To facilitate WAI-ARIA Breadcrumb support, a new template tag was added in 6.3. Unlike the other template tags that start and end with %, this template tag is simply bcn-aria-current. This tag is replaced with aria-current="page" when the breadcrumb represents the current page, otherwise it is replaced with an empty string.

As always, you can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page. If you experience any issues with this version of Breadcrumb NavXT, please leave a comment on this post detailing the issue.