Rails Breadcrumbs

A nice way to add breadcrumbs to your application. Antonio Cangiano posted a link in the Ruby on Rails weblog to a post which talked about adding breadcrumbs to your Rails application. I've been doing this with helpers, but as the post says this is "Easy and flexible". So I've created the plugin.

Installing

Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'rails-breadcrumbs'
# gem 'rails-breadcrumbs', :git => 'https://github.com/fesplugas/rails-breadcrumbs.git'

Usage

On your app/controllers/application.rb:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  before_filter :set_initial_breadcrumbs

  add_breadcrumb 'Home', '/'

  private

  def set_initial_breadcrumbs
    add_breadcrumb _("Home"), :home_path
  end

end

On your app/controllers/categories_controller.rb:

class CaegoriesController < ApplicationController

  add_breadcrumb 'Things', :things_path
  add_breadcrumb 'Create a new thing', '', :only => [:new, :create]
  add_breadcrumb 'Edit a thing', '', :only => [:edit, :update]

  def show
    @thing = Thing.find(params[:id])
    add_breadcrumb @thing.name, ''
  end

end

On your app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:

<%= breadcrumbs %>
<%= breadcrumbs("=>") %> <!-- You can define the separator you want -->

Acknowledgments

• Przemyslaw Kowalczyk for his post http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/easy-and-flexible-breadcrumbs-for-rails/
• Original code by: Francesc Esplugas Marti
• Updated Syntax by Greg Bell: http://github.com/gregbell/simplified_breadcrumbs/tree/master

Copyright (c) 2008-2011 Francesc Esplugas Marti, released under the MIT license