I’ve been working with MOSS since the product was in beta, before that I worked with SPS, and before that STS – a long time OK. Well not long enough that once in a while something obvious doesn’t make me go “Oh, that’s how that works.” It happened to me again yesterday when I was writing up some documentation on SharePoint’s breadcrumbs.

All along I’ve taken it for granted that the breadcrumbs are usually just below the global navigation but then sometimes clear at the top-left of the page. I’ve done a lot of branding for different clients and they’ve often wanted these things moved around. So that’s what I’m blaming my ignorance on. I’m sure I would have spotted this pattern earlier otherwise.

So this is the out of the box behavior. It’s simple really:

At the top-left of the page the breadcrumb is made up of no more than 3 parts [portal connection (if set)]>[root site]>[site source of global navigation]

Update: I realized after posting this that I didn’t quite have the behavior of the top breadcrumb correct – though it still is pretty simple:

At the top left of the page, the breadcrumb shows[Portal Connection (if set)]>[root site]>[any sites above the current one where global navigation is not inherited.]

Just below the global navigation, the breadcrumb will reflect the path from the site where the current site gets its global navigation to your present location in the current site.

Example:

I’ve created 3 nested sites under Intranoggin.

Here are the breadcrumbs when I’m on Leaf Site and Leaf Site, Mid Site 1 and Mid Site 2 all inherit the global navigation:

Now, if I break inheritance at Mid Site 2 for the global navigation, the breadcrumbs at the leaf site look like this:

Notice that the breadcrumbs can no longer get me to Mid Site 1.

If I then go to Mid Site 1 and break inheritance there for global navigation, I see this at the leaf site

TaDa!

Oh, and while I’m blogging recent revelations, there is this thing on my kitchen shears:

I’m not positive what this is supposed to be for, but I noticed this week that it does a great job of cutting the foil off the top of a wine bottle. My wife and I got these in a knife set when we were married 9 years ago, and now I have a use for it. This truly is an age of enlightenment.