Breadcrumbs with PHP

Posted In: PHP: Jan 17th, 2009 @ 8:23 pm PST; (0) Comments

During the development of this site there came a time—as there should in all well designed sites that care about usability and SEO—to consider a script that would execute a breadcrumb trail. I looked over some scripts during a search of what other developers before me had used to get the job done, and I came across a few that I'm sure would have worked quite well. Yet, I never feel comfortable using a piece of software unless I know exactly what it does, so I turned to PHP in an attempt to get a better understanding of how to add this indispensable navigational tool.

The primary goals of my script was to accomplish usability and SEO. The user should be able to determine his/her position within the hierarchy while revealing the sites structure to the search engines. Breadcrumbs are useful to SEO for many reasons.

Keyword-rich anchor text
Every page links to the Home page
Allows indexing of more pages
Lightweight navigation system for mobile devices

Here is some of my PHP script, or you can see the complete breadcrumb script with notes included.

<?php
function breadCrumbs($url, $crumbDivider = "»", $wordDivider = "-", $id = "breadCrumbs")
{
    $dirs = explode("/", $url);
    $page = ucwords(implode(" ", 
            explode($wordDivider, 
            substr($dirs[sizeof($dirs) - 1], 0, 
            strpos($dirs[sizeof($dirs) - 1], ".")))));
    if(sizeof($dirs) > 2)
    {
       $path = array("Home");
       $href = "http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}/";
       $breadCrumbs = "<div id='{$id}'><a href='{$href}'>Morgan</a>";