Site hierarchy context pointers in the banner of a page

What's the name for this technique?

[fish_eye]

I'm trying to implement one of those site hierarchy context pointer thiniges in the banner of a page. The type that has links up to the parent and the grandparent. You know the sort of thing:

Section A -> Sub-section A.1 -> Page 42

I want to do some research into it first. The technique has a specific name but I can't remember what it's called?

[encyclo]

You are looking for the phrase breadcrumb navigation. ;)

[fish_eye]

Indeed - many thanks - now.... do you have a quick and easy php solution (kind of kidding).

I guess the proper way to do it is to have all my pages stored in a database and I use the content management system for that database to build my site map and my breadcrumbs?

At the moment I simply have the head, banner, menu and footer as includes. I guess I can derive the context of where I am (from within my included banner or menu) using REQUEST_URI (or somesuch) and then deciphering the slashes linking this back to details of the structure I have stored somewhere (in another include if I don't want to use a database)?

[encyclo]

I'm not really a PHP guru, but if you are simply using PHP includes for sections of each otherwise static page, a really quick and dirty solution could be to set the page's breadcrumb's as variables before including the head.

<?php
$grandparentCat="Widgets";
$parentCat="Blue Widgets";
include ($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/includes/head.inc.php");?>

Then in the head section check to see if the variables have been set and echo the appropriate breadcrumb. The above is hopelessly incomplete but you should get the idea...

[fish_eye]

I do get the drift - yes thanks.

It's not a huge site, and what's there is pretty static, it just grows a bit now and then so this is probably a good option.

It has a very specific topic / user base so the page names / topics are a bit jargonish and would benefit from breadcrumbs I believe.

Many thanks, Sam.