The beta is coming soon, very soon. I have a mostly functional version of the breadcrumb class working on my testbed, and tomorrow night I’ll get to work on the administration interface and creating the template for the language files. Then I’ll go back to tidying up loose ends in the class, and release a beta sometime tomorrow evening. So far, just about everything has been rewritten, and all custom wpdb queries were removed. This may cause a slight performance hit, but it should not be that big, unless the pages are very large, and this solves compatibility issues with some other plug-ins, namely the Polyglot plug-in. A the new hierarchical category system has been implemented, and there is now support for multi-paged searches, archives, and home pages. When the beta is released I will need testers that are willing to help debug the plug-in, as well as translators who are willing to write language files for the new administration interface.

Right now I need testers for:

• Testing PHP4 compatibility (Even though I don’t officially support PHP4 anymore, I do try to keep things working in it)
• Testing on blogs with various setups for static front pages, including the built in WordPress methods. It seems that the older versions still had bugs in regards to particular implementations of this, and it looked like the old code had some hacks that attempted to get things to work for static front pages. It’s time to get this working properly.
• General testing, making sure options work as expected, etc.

Once the beta is out I request all bug reports be made in the post that it is announced in, this will keep the Breadcrumb NavXT page’s comment stream cleaner for once the plug-in is officially released.

-John Havlik

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Now with 100% more tags. That’s right, WordPres 2.3 is right around the metaphorical corner, and in preparation Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0 is now safe for general consumption. Support for the Simple Tagging Plugin was dropped in favor of the WordPress 2.3 taxonomy scheme. Additional changes include some bug fixes with those combobox setting selectors in the administration interface and some code fix ups to use the WordPress API in a more consistent manner when dealing with taxonomy. Remember that this may cause PHP indigestion problems for WordPress 2.2 or earlier. The old version (1.9.x) will remain available for one month. However, version 1.9.x will no longer be supported one week after WordPress 2.3 is released.

-John Havlik

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Holy GUIs, Batman! Yep, the new Breadcrumb Navigation XT administration panel/GUI is finished and distributed with the new version. Other than the administration panel, some tweaks were made involving the behavior for attachment posts (which are broken for certain permalink structures until WordPress 2.4), search pages, and date archive pages. Attachment posts are properly supported and recognized as an attachment of a post instead of a post in the ‘uncategorized’ category. Now in search pages, the search terms are output into the breadcrumb along with a customizable prefix and suffix replacing the single title of previous versions. Date archive pages when the year, month, and day are specified now allow three of the most common wording orders: big endian (ISO standard), middle endian (common in the US), and little endian (common in Europe).

The next major version 2.0.0 will contain major changes and support for WordPress 2.3. It will not be released until a WordPress 2.3 preview release has been released. 2.0.0 will nearly be rewritten from the ground up to address some performance concerns I have about the current code. These mainly pertain to unnecessary redundant branch statements that require some major work to fix. Until then, do grab Breadcrumb NavXT from its project page.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Since the original author of Breadcrumb Navigation XT ran out of time for further development of the WordPress plug-in, I have picked it up. After a few days of coding and working on setting up the code section of this blog, the new version is ready for release. This new version, 1.8.0, includes support for author pages, and limiting the number of categories displayed in the breadcrumb.

Note that beginning with this release the version numbering scheme is to follow the same as WordPress uses, the first digit changes for major changes and as the second runs past 9. The second digit changes with the addition of features, internal structure of the class will not change in with a change in this digit. Finally, the third digit signifies a bugfix to features previously introduced without any added features. The next version, 1.9, is planned for the release of WordPress 2.3 due to the addition of tags into WordPress.

Check out the Breadcrumb NavXT project page to get the latest version.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]