Breadcrumb confusion

I thought "breadcrumbs" were supposed to show you your path from where you are in the site back to the home page.

Now NopCommerce does this ok if you're starting at a Category clicking on thru to a product, however if you start at a Manufacturer, it starts acting a bit weird.

Try this:  

1. Go to the NopCommerce Demo Store

2. From the home page, click the category COMPUTERS then the subcategory NOTEBOOKS.

So far so good, the breadcrumbs show "TOP / COMPUTERS / NOTEBOOKS" and the Category "Notebooks" on the left navigation is highlighted in Orange/Bold type to denote that's where we are.

3.  Click on the first product ASUS EEE PC 1000HA

Again breadcrumbs are correct, and the highlight (active) is still on the NOTEBOOKS subcategory.

This is where things take a turn

4.  Click the logo in the upper left to bring you back to the home page.  The highlighted category goes away as it should and you're looking at the main page.


5. Click ASUS under the Manufacturers in the left navigation.

The word ASUS is highlighted in bold as you would expect.  There are no breadcrumbs on this page.

6.  Click on "Details" of the same product from step #3 the ASUS EEE PC 1000HA

WHOAA... Now all of a sudden, ASUS under Manufacturer goes back to inactive/unhighlighted and in turn our Category NOTEBOOK is now highlighted/active.   And our breadcrumb shows TOP / COMPUTERS / NOTEBOOKS /ASUS EEE PC 1000HA.

What's up with that?  Shouldn't the breadcrumb be TOP / ASUS / ASUS EEE PC 1000HA??  After all if I click my back button, that's how the pages in reverse would display.

Hate to say it, but this makes the breadcrumbs confusing and nearly useless.

EDIT:

It ALSO makes the highlighting ("Active" and "Inactive") of the navigation menu items useless.  Even if you disable breadcrumbs the oddball highlighting still occurs.

Hi,

The breadcrumb is generated using the first category that the product is assigned to. This can also produce a funny effect when a product is assigned to multiple categories.

Lets say you had this laptop called Product123 in Computers->Notebooks and also in Compters-> Refurbished (this category doesn't exist on demo). If you were to click on Computers->Refurbished->Product123 the breadcrumb would read TOP/Computers/Notebooks/Product123 and not Top/Computers/Refurbished/Product123...

But you know what, this product is open source, that means that we can change it to suit our needs. You could re-write it so that the breadcrumb is generated from the links clicked, variables passed in the URL, etc... Maybe it could make it into the next release...

Jose

I've been using another .net cart and its interesting how they deal with this.

They construct URLs to products in this form, but then have numeric codes at the end...

example.com/computers/notebook/asus100H_3_12_3.aspx

or something like that.  I assumed the numbers identified the product, but they appear to do that, as well as detailing the path.

This approach does however mean that a single product can be available on more than one URL, eg

example.com/manufacturers/asus/asus100H_3_15_9.aspx

They use a canonical link in the page for SEO purposes (so that google knows these different paths to the page are in fact (essentially) the same page.

Is this the best way to handle it in nop, or is there a better way?