Neil Black - Perl Breadcrumb Trail

Installation

The Perl Breadcrumb Trail navigation menu script is very easy to install, even if you have no Perl or web development experience, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Before you Start:

As the CGI script creates the menus dynamically, you need to follow a few simple rules to get the most form it. Although, if you follow good web development practices, you’ll probably find you already are.

Folder and file names must be descriptive. The script uses these to create the anchor description
Use _ (underscore) where you want a space. The script will convert these to a space in the anchor description
Every folder must have an index file. “Index” will not be used in the anchor description, but the folder name will

Installing the Script:

Change the first line of the script to your path for Perl. If its #!/usr/bin/perl then you don’t need to change anything. If you’re not sure, ask your hosting provider
FTP the script to you cgi-bin (or any folder that can run cgi scripts) in ASCII mode
CHMOD the script permissions to 755, that’s owner; read, write, execute. Group and public; read and execute
Use  (change to the location you have the script) in your (x)HTML where you want the menus to appear
That’s you! You should now have a working CGI dynamic navigation menu

Note, you can change the formatting of the menu in 2 ways. The first is to hard code it in the script. That will work, but its more flexible if you use an anchor style sheet. Then you can make it fit your site without having to change the script.