Page Navigation Improvements

I spent the last couple of hours making the breadcrumbs on top of most pages more useful. They’d always been there, but as a navigation tool there were pretty confusing, to be honest. Missing parents (the main blog page was never included!), confusing hierarchies (breadcrumbs for a download post didn’t lead to the Downloads page!) etc.
I’d never really dug into the plugin and wasn’t sure how much work this would be. Turns out that most changes were relatively easy because the plugin already supports them. I had to make some code modifications for others, though.

Anyway, breadcrumbs should be useful now. They lead back to the Blog page for all regular posts, and use the Videos and Download pages as parent when looking at a post that falls into either category. I also changed the game-related categories around so that their listings leads to the individual portfolio pages (which already contain a list all related topics).

The only remaining item on my list is better gallery navigation. All of my gallery entries are put in the “Misc Stuff” category by default, which is wrong (Know of a way to change the category in WordPress? Let me know! I don’t want to hack the database entries). And more importantly, I can’t figure out yet how to query the parent post of an attachment, so that I can add an automatic link to the parent post for each gallery entry. I regularly get direct visitors that find this or that image through Google and Yahoo! searches, and with no way to browse back to the parent post, those people don’t even know that the image they’re watching is part of a larger set. Gotta figure this out at some point…maybe my questions in the WordPress forums will yield an answer.

I’m getting a bit sidetracked by all this WordPress coding (it’s fun!), but I have plans for Quake editing as well for this long Labor Day weekend. More on that when I get to it.