Help:Wiki University Wikitext--Breadcrumb Trails

What are Breadcrumb Trails
You are probably familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel. The children were taken by their evil step-mother and abandoned in the dark woods, but they left a trail of breadcrumbs so they could find the way back home. Unfortunately, birds came and ate the breadcrumbs and Hansel and Gretel were lost. However, the story ends happily and the children were united with their father. So what does that have to do with the Wiki? We use "breadcrumb trails" to get us back to the main article we left to follow other related pages. This might be going from a country page, to a state page, then to a county page and ending up on a city page. If you decided that the city was not the right one and wanted to go back to the county page, you would have to enter the county name in the search box and select from pages with similar names to return to that page. Rather than having to go through all that effort, if we have a breadcrumb trail on the city page, for example, it could lead us all the way back even to the country page. This would lessen the irritation of trying to get back to where we started.

Location of breadcrumb trails on pages
They usually appear at the top of the page and often times just below the SEO. We will talk about SEOs in an upcoming lesson. Here is an example of a breadcrumb trail.

Creating breadcrumb trails
A breadcrumb trail is really nothing more than internal links strung together separated by an arrow or something similar that would lead you to another page. Here is the coding for the "breadcrumb trail" link: United States > Missouri > Adair County >


 * NOTICE the little green arrows have been removed and substituted with > signs. The little green arrows [[Image:Gotoarrow.png]] [[Image:Gotoarrow.png]] are images, but you can use the > signs instead.


 * NOTICE the is actually a template that automatically places the name of the page you are on in the place where this template appears.
 * More on templates in the Advanced section of these chapters.

Try these out
 Exercises Check your answers
 * Take these four pages in FamilySearch Wiki and link them together with a breadcrumb trail:
 * United States
 * New York
 * New York City
 * Bronx County
 * Use a > as the pointer to the next page.

 Quick Quiz
 * Breadcrumb trails are usually placed at the bottom of the page.
 * A. True
 * B. False


 * Breadcrumb trails are external links placed in order of size.
 * A. True
 * B. False


 * Breadcrumb trails are not to be used to go back to preceding pages that you came from.
 * A. True
 * B. False

Check your answers