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NavXT 3.3.0, only one plugin is shipped, the old and separate “core” and “administrative interface” plugins have been superseded with just one Breadcrumb NavXT plugin.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

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

This first service release for the 3.2 branch of Breadcrumb NavXT includes many bug fixes. The bcn_display() and bcn_display_list() wrapper functions obey the $return parameter. Checks are now made to ensure anchor titles remain valid, even when the title of the page has HTML in it. Many fixes involving the import feature are included. Previously, the importer did not handle html entities correctly causing all sorts of problems. Translations for the Belorussian language are now included thanks to “Fat Cow”. Lastly, the administrative interface should work (sort of) with WordPress 2.6 again, do note that in Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0 WordPress 2.7 will be required.

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

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Holy backupable settings Batman! With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0 you can import and export your settings to/from a XML file. This should help anyone migrate from a testbed to a production environment. You may also reset to the default Breadcrumb NavXT settings in the event the settings become corrupted. Additional features of Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0 are the ability to output the breadcrumb trail in reverse order and the ability to output each breadcrumb wrapped in <li> tags.

This release was somewhat delayed. Fret not, we shall see another release by July. Also, note that the French translation is out of date. The previous translator has not responded to the e-mail announcement made a week ago. If you have an updated French translation, please sent it to me via e-mail (see contact page for e-mail address).

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

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Almost two weeks ago, the release of Breadcrumb NavXT was said to occur last week. While the features new to 3.2.0 are done, there are some minor tweaks that need to be done before the translators can begin translating the new strings. Due to some new features, one was waiting of feedback on their implementation before proceeding. Additionally, Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0’s administrative interface was adapted to work on WordPress 2.8. The problem being these modifications break WordPress 2.7 support for the tabbed options, and WordPress 2.8’s release slipping three weeks (it’ll be another two weeks before 2.8 is released).

So where does this leave us? It will take this weekend to finish up some code to make the administrative interface compatible with WordPress 2.7 again. Additionally, some WordPress MU testing will take place, preliminary tests show that Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0 should behave as expected with WordPress MU 2.7.1. Currently, next Thursday is the intended release date for Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]