By the end of this month, or in early April (hopefully sooner than later), Dev4Press will have its newest plugin dedicated to breadcrumbs, replacing the current GD Crumbs Navigator Pro plugin.
GD Crumbs Navigator Pro was released almost 5 years ago, but it had never was very popular; even so, it was the most feature-complete breadcrumbs plugin on the market. But, over the past year, I have been making the list of things that I would change with the existing plugin, and in the end, it was more and more obvious that GD Crumbs Navigator Pro would require too many changes and many of them breaking changes to make it better.
So, I have been working on and off on a new plugin written 100% from scratch for the past few months. This new plugin (I will not reveal the plugin name yet, more on that later) will be a product of everything I learned with GD Crumbs Navigator Pro and everything I wanted to make better.
The new plugin will be available in Free and Pro editions, and because of the Free edition, I can’t announce the plugin name until I submit the first Free version to WordPress.org for approval. The free version will have most of the Pro version features, but some more complex features will remain in Pro only.
The new plugin will work quite differently from GD Crumbs Navigator Pro, with better-defined roles for different code parts. This will allow for a much greater degree of expandability of the plugin and more flexibility in handling data.
Here is the overview of the plugin features:
- Modern Sass-based styling, using CSS variables to make it easier to apply custom styling to some elements, with full support for RTL orientation and separate CSS stylesheets for LTR and RTL.
- Support for JSON-LD-based rich snippets. The old plugin has support for different rich snippet formats, but with all the current trends, JSON-LD is a defacto standard, and I see no reason to mess the HTML markup with something that can be done better with the new format.
- Breadcrumbs separator controls allowing to use of font icons, characters, or custom HTML. Plugin CSS comes with a lightweight font with several icons to use by default.
- Integration support for various themes allowing you to pick the theme you use and where to add breadcrumbs, and the plugin will do it for you without the need for any code to be added to the theme. It might require some CSS tweaks to make it look better, depending on the theme styling. The first version will support themes: Genesis, GeneratePress, OceanWP, Astra, and Storefront.
- Integration support to specify action name and priority for adding breadcrumbs, which can be useful for any theme that has actions but is not directly supported for integration.
- About 10 options to change CSS styling for the breadcrumbs, including font size, margins, and decorations for the text.
- Detailed options to change the visibility of breadcrumbs on various types of WordPress pages, and options to control output for home crumb (it can use a home icon or custom HTML), and more.
- Support for third-party plugins when it comes to breadcrumbs generating support: bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and the Dev4Press plugins: GD Topic Prefix Pro, GD Members Directory, GD Knowledge Base Pro, GD Content Tools Pro.
- Function/Class to generate breadcrumbs on demand for any type of page in WordPress. Auto-generated breadcrumbs depend on the current page to detect what the breadcrumbs should look like. But, with this plugin, you can generate breadcrumbs for anything to display anywhere.
- Support for generating multi-path breadcrumbs blocks. This feature is from GD Crumbs Navigator Pro, but this will be even better and more flexible. This feature will be in the Pro plugin version only.
Most likely, there is more to be included, and not yet have I decided what features will be Pro only, but even the Free version will be very much a full-featured plugin. There is a list of features that will not be part of the first version but will be considered for future releases.
Let me know what you think about the currently proposed scope and if you have any suggestions for the new plugin.
