Holy custom taxonomies batman! With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.0 support for taxonomies was rewritten for support of WordPress’ custom taxonomies for taxonomy archives and posts. Additionally, dates may be used as the taxonomy in the breadcrumb trail for posts now. Finally, translations in Italian are now available thanks to Luca Camellini.

You can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

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After numerous delays, development on Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.0 has resumed. Currently, the status of hierarchical custom taxonomy support is being evaluated. Single level custom taxonomies appear to work correctly, minus a few things pertaining to Breadcrumb NavXT settings (e.g. it will still say “Archive by Tag:” on custom taxonomy archive pages). After that, for the 3.4.0 release, all that remains will be to do some reworking of the administrative interface to handle the new taxonomy structure. Do note that while hierarchical custom taxonomies are some what broken (in WordPress) at the moment, since the API is already there, when they do get fixed Breadcrumb NavXT will be ready to take full advantage of them.

Also, due to the change in how taxonomies are handled internally by Breadcrumb NavXT in version 3.4.0, versions of WordPress prior to 2.8 may generate errors. One is not checking for WordPress compatibility prior to 2.8.x.

By Monday, November 16th, the translation team will be notified that the SVN trunk version of Breadcrumb NavXT will be ready for translation updates. This places the release date for 3.4.0 on November 20th at the earliest, and November 23rd being the likely release date. The forecast for 3.5.0 places the release near the end of January, 2010.

-John Havlik

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Holy consolidated plugins Batman! With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0, only one plugin is shipped, the old and separate “core” and “administrative interface” plugins have been superseded with just one Breadcrumb NavXT plugin. Direct access to the bcn_breadcrumb and bcn_breadcrumb_trail classes is still possible for those who need more flexibility than the administrative interface offers. Under the hood, the bcn_breadcrumb class has expanded to include some code that should have been in it rather than bcn_breadcrumb_trail. At the same time the code in the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class has been refactored to reduce duplicate code and reduce execution time.

Minor changes were made to the XML importer/exporter so that the XML output is well formed XML. With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0, two new translation sets have been added, Swedish and Russian thanks to Patrik Spathon and Yuri Gribov. There are now five up to date translations distributed with Breadcrumb NavXT along with the default English strings. These are:

• Spanish by Karin Sequen
• German by Tom Klingenberg
• Dutch by Stan Lenssen
• Russian by Yuri Gribov
• Swedish by Patrik Spathon

Again, the French translation has not been updated for this release since the former translator did not respond to the release notice a week ago. If you know French and can update the translation, please leave a comment to this post. Also, if you do not see your language in the list and wish to provide a translation, please leave a comment to this post stating so.

You can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

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Next week, Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0 will be released. This release contains several under-the-hood changes, and a few general changes that will affect everyone.

First off, there will only be one plugin distributed with Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0. The core plugin was removed, and the administrative interface plugin was renamed to just “Breadcrumb NavXT”. For most users, this change will only require that the user verifies the WordPress plugin updater reactivates the correct plugin. For those manually accessing the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class, you may continue to do so, just keep in mind that you just activate the “Breadcrumb NavXT” plugin rather than the core plugin. The other notable change that affects everyone is the “Breadcrumb Max Title Length” setting now affects the length of all breadcrumb titles, not just the current post’s title.

Those who are manually accessing the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class there are several changes to the bcn_breadcrumb_trail and bcn_breadcrumb classes. These changes are part of a code refactoring effort that reduced much of the duplicate code within the plugin and standardize the code style within the plugin. Previously, the core classes did not explicitly need PHP5, however, beginning with Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0 they require PHP5.

In the next week, the documentation for Breadcrumb NavXT will be updated to reflect the changes in 3.3.0, and a new set of tutorials will be written during August.

-John Havlik

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