John Havlik

There is no short code in the core plugin (short codes have been deprecated), you can either use the included Gutenberg block, widget, or call bcn_display() in your theme file (some examples are available in this article: https://mtekk.us/archives/guides/calling-the-breadcrumb-trail/).

Well, one, I don’t think there’s actually an issue there. Why the google tool calls it “unnamed item”, I don’t know but there isn’t an actual error there.

The first thing to double check is the actual markup that is generated (make sure there isn’t anything goofy happening CSS styling wise that is hiding the title). If you are using the default Breadcrumb NavXT settings (which appears to be the case), you should be seeing the titles in the generated breadcrumb tail.

The first issue is that the category template will be used for all categories, so if you ever use the hierarchy feature of categories, now each category in the breadcrumb trail will have this extra item. Second, since you’ve quasi “hard coded” in a breadcrumb, if anything changes, you will have to update this setting as well to match the changes (change the breadcrumb separator, change the site URL). Lastly, the templates are not meant to be used in this manner, and at any point in the future this may stop working (if strict validation was enforced).

Set a “Posts Page” in the WordPress settings, under Settings > Reading. You will also have to set a page to use as your front page, but regardless, that’s how you add a page in front of the breadcrumbs for posts. In your case, it appears you want “News” to show up in the breadcrumb trail, so set that as your “Posts Page”. After doing this, you may also have to make sure the “Blog Breadcrumb” setting is checked in the Breadcrumb NavXT settings page.

To follow up on this, I finally got PHP8 working on my testbed (had to move to PHP-FPM instead of mod_php). I’m not getting the error you’re seeing on your site running PHP8. For clarification, you get this error when simply visiting the Breadcrumb NavXT settings screen (not even changing a setting), correct? If so, just as a test, can you de-activate all other plugins you may have active and see if you get the same message (I’m wondering if there is some sort of interaction between another plugin that is happening)?

The solution to the concern about long URLs is to adjust your permalinks for your posts/pages (remove excess/repetitive words from the permalink). As stated above, there isn’t a penalty for having ‘/’ in the URL if you are actually showing hierarchy, which you are with a parent->child relationship, and that will match what the breadcrumb trail is showing. Trying to have a flat URL structure for a hierarchical post type doesn’t really make sense. Likewise, trying to show a hierarchy in a breadcrumb trail where it doesn’t exist (and hence a flat URL structure) doesn’t really make sense either as the breadcrumb trail should reflect the actual location of a resource within your site hierarchy.

If you really want to do things the difficult way (not recommended), there is an extension to Breadcrumb NavXT that allows you to use a WordPress menu to define the hierarchy used for the breadcrumb trail. However, for what you’re doing it’s going to be extra work that really isn’t necessary.

The URL is not influenced by the plugin. If you disable Breadcrumb NavXT the URL is going to be the same as it is right now. Likewise, the URL does not influence the breadcrumb trail that Breadcrumb NavXT generates, the parent->child relationship of terms and posts does (e.g. the actual content location/organization is what matters for Breadcrumb NavXT). This parent->child relationship is what WordPress uses in the permalink for hierarchical post types, hence why the URL structure seems to match the breadcrumb structure. In fact, this is a good thing. Having multiple levels in your URLs (having multiple /) is not a bad thing as long as items at the save level are actually related to the parent level.

Regarding long URLs, having multiple levels in the URL is not a problem. Using long permalinks due to very long titles, can be a problem. However, WordPress allows you to change the permalink for a post from what it generates by default, use that feature if you think things are getting long. Your example isn’t that long of a URL, and as long as the individual URLs make sense, it should be fine (it looks like your titles may all contain about the same word so you’re probably being verbose/repetitive and can clean that up in the permalinks).