Starting this week, we're fine-tuning the design of pages and toolbars here on Fusion. The first step came yesterday, when we added breadcrumbs to stories (look above the top headline on this page, for example).
The breadcrumbs are dynamically generated through some Apache variables and if/then statements embedded in an include on each story page. We have three variants of this include, one for each of our three "channels" (Enterprise Networks, Service Provider Networks and SMB Networks). That's where the channel name on the left comes from. But that's boring, because there's nothing dynamic about it - our content-management system puts the link to the appropriate include on the page before it's posted to the site.
Once on the site, though, the include tells Apache to set the main "topic" of the page, based on a meta field created by a human editor in the CMS and then looks up the appropriate topic and topic URL and echoes that into HTML.
Whee! Where it gets more interesting, though, is in deciding just what sort of breadcrumbs to set. Right now, you'll notice the breadcrumbs point to a particular topic, for example, "LANs" or
"storage". However, it might also make sense to have another breadcrumb pointing to a more "horizontal" page, for example, "news" or "reviews." Something to work on this week.
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