August 27th, 2013

Breadcrumb NavXT Hits One Million Downloads

Back on Thursday evening, Breadcrumb NavXT hit one million downloads on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This is the total number of downloads since it was first introduced in the plugin repository almost six years ago. Not many plugins have hit this milestone, and it is exciting to have written something that has been downloaded a million times. At this juncture, it seems appropriate to reveal my vision for the future of Breadcrumb NavXT.

The Future

Breadcrumb NavXT 5.0, is functionally ready for testing. Only some polishing and documentation is left before it is ready for release. The reason for skipping versions 4.5 through 4.9 is the fact that a substantial reorganization of the plugin has occurred for this version. The changes should make Breadcrumb NavXT more flexible, and were necessary to implement an Network Admin settings page. Expect to see 5.0 near the beginning of October.

Currently, the plans for 5.1 are a little open, though it is likely it will contain several tweaks that fix issues that have been punted for some time. See the issue list on GitHub for Breadcrumb NavXT milestone 5.1. Additionally, for 5.1 the introduction of a more formal regression/unit test suite is likely to happen. As for a release date, sometime between the end of December 2013 and mid January 2014 is the target release time-frame.

Something New

There are several features that groups of users have wanted Breadcrumb NavXT to have for quite some time. While introduction of these features into the main plugin has been resisted—and will continue to be resisted—going forward many of these features will make their way into premium add-on plugins.

These features have enough demand to warrant an add-on plugin, but are not applicable to the majority of use cases for Breadcrumb NavXT. To service this demand, beginning in September, a handful of premium add-on plugins will be released for Breadcrumb NavXT to add functionality. Take a look at how Easy Digital Downloads is run, that is the model that will be used here. More information on this will be made available later this week.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

June 20th, 2013

How to Add li and Other Tags to Breadcrumb Templates

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

Since Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3.0, all settings that can contain HTML are passed through wp_kses(). With this change, only a basic set of acceptable tags and properties within tags were allowed. Naturally, this restricted users more than they were used to. The restriction wasn’t the biggest problem, the lack of a filter to allow users to add their own tags in to the allowed HTML tag list. However, with Breadcrumb NavXT 4.4, a new filter bcn_allowed_html has been introduced to fix this issue.

The default set of allowed HTML tags in Breadcrumb NavXT 4.4 consists of: <a>, <img>, <span>, <h1>, and <h2>. For the purposes of this guide, let’s assume you don’t want to use the built in bcn_display_list() function to output breadcrumbs wrapped in <li> tags. The reason you would want to do this is if you need additional properties within the tag (Breadcrumb NavXT will by default add a class but that’s it).

In Breadcrumb NavXT 4.4, adding a tag to the allowed HTML list for Breadcrumb NavXT is really easy. Just create a function with one input argument ($allowed_html in this example). Within that function append, using the HTML tag name as the array entry key, assign an array of properties that tag is allowed to have, using the property name as the array entry key and a value of true. Then add your filter function to the ‘bcn_allowed_html’ filter hook. Below is an example of this for the <li> tag with a selection of properties.

function my_bcn_allowed_html($allowed_html)
{
	$allowed_html['li'] = array(
		'title' => true,
		'class' => true,
		'id' => true,
		'dir' => true,
		'align' => true,
		'lang' => true,
		'xml:lang' => true,
		'aria-hidden' => true,
		'data-icon' => true,
		'itemref' => true,
		'itemid' => true,
		'itemprop' => true,
		'itemscope' => true,
		'itemtype' => true
	);
	return $allowed_html;
}
add_filter('bcn_allowed_html', 'my_bcn_allowed_html');

To get started quickly, just copy and paste the above code into a site specific plugin and start playing.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Breadcrumb NavXT Title Trixx

Breadcrumb NavXT Menu Magic

The Future

Something New