gretel

Gretel is a Ruby on Rails plugin that simplifies the creation of breadcrumb navigation trails in web applications. It treats breadcrumbs as a view concern, allowing developers to define them in configuration files and specify which to use directly in views. The plugin supports semantic breadcrumbs for SEO and accessibility, making it a robust solution for navigation structure.

Key Features

• View-Centric Configuration — Define breadcrumbs in config/breadcrumbs.rb or multiple files, keeping logic separate from controllers.
• Semantic Breadcrumbs — Generate structured data for Google search results and accessibility compliance.
• Flexible Styling — Built-in support for popular CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, and Bulma, with customizable separators and classes.
• Parent Inference — Automatically infer breadcrumbs from model instances and handle recursive parent-child relationships.
• Manual Control — Access breadcrumb data as an array for fully custom HTML rendering when needed.
• ARIA Support — Include aria-current attributes and other accessibility features out of the box.
• Engine Integration — Automatically load breadcrumbs from Rails engines, with app-level overrides.

Philosophy

Gretel is designed around the principle that breadcrumbs are a presentation-layer concern, offering a clean separation between navigation logic and application controllers while maintaining flexibility for complex use cases.