phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide

An easy way to add navigational links to your MOD is to use an inbuilt feature of phpBB3 called “breadcrumbs” (named because it leaves a trail back to the forum index).

It only requires a few extra lines of PHP code to add a breadcrumb to your own MOD (or to your website if you are doing personal customisations). This article explains how to do so.

To understand how this works, open styles/prosilver/template/overall_header.html and find this code:

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<!-- BEGIN navlinks --> <strong>‹</strong> <a href="{navlinks.U_VIEW_FORUM}">{navlinks.FORUM_NAME}</a><!-- END navlinks -->

This section of templating code is responsible for the creation of the breadcrumbs your see at the top of your forum.

As you can see from the code, “{navlinks.U_VIEW_FORUM}” is the actual web address of the page and “{navlinks.FORUM_NAME}” is the name of the page you are linking to.

To add a breadcrumb of your own in your MOD, open the main .php file for your MOD. Then find the page_header function call in your script (you may have several of these, so you can do this to some or all of them if you wish).

Before the page_header call, add this code:

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$template->assign_block_vars('navlinks', array(
'FORUM_NAME' => $user->lang['MOD_INDEX'],
'U_VIEW_FORUM' => append_sid('my_mod.'.$phpEx),
));

As you can see, this templating code corresponds to the “navlinks” loop shown above in overall_header.html

It would give an output like this:

$user->lang['MOD_INDEX'] is only an example language variable, you can set this to any language variable you like (or if it is for personal use and not a MOD, a hard coded string). In the append_sid call, you also need to replace “my_mod” with whatever the name of your .php page is called. If for whatever reason you wanted to link off-site, you could do this also by hard-coding a string. (ie. ‘U_VIEW_FORUM’ => ‘http://www.example.com’,)

Another feature of the breadcrumbs is that as it is using a template loop, you can include the code repeatedly to get more links. You could also include the code inside a loop to good effect (a foreach loop would be very useful).

For instance, you could use this code:

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$navlinks_array = array(
array(
'FORUM_NAME' => $user->lang['MOD_INDEX'],
'U_VIEW_FORUM' => append_sid('my_mod.'.$phpEx),
),

array(
'FORUM_NAME' => $user->lang['MOD_SUBPAGE'],
'U_VIEW_FORUM' => append_sid('my_mod.'.$phpEx, 's=1'),
),

array(
'FORUM_NAME' => $user->lang['MOD_SUBPAGE_2'],
'U_VIEW_FORUM' => append_sid('my_mod.'.$phpEx, 's=2'),
),
);

foreach( $navlinks_array as $name )
{
$template->assign_block_vars('navlinks', array(
'FORUM_NAME' => $name['FORUM_NAME'],
'U_VIEW_FORUM' => $name['U_VIEW_FORUM'],
));
}

To generate an output like this:

As these examples only require PHP changes and no template changes, there is no need to purge the cache once the changes have been applied.

I hope this article has been useful.