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I came across a problem with Drupal's breadcrumbs not working properly with path aliasing. For instance, you're in the 'about' section...then you go to a sub-page of that section and the url says 'about/people'. What this friendly url actually means though is node/8. So if I'm creating page nodes and aliasing them to 'about/contact' and 'about/services', it's deceiving because these paths really don't have any sort of relationship to one another, other than a visual one created by the path aliasing. Drupal's breadcrumb isn't smart enough to interpret all these paths as being related, inside the 'about' section so I had to make some modifications.

In template.php:

/**
 * Return a themed breadcrumb trail.
 *
 * @param $breadcrumb
 *   An array containing the breadcrumb links.
 * @return a string containing the breadcrumb output.
 */
function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) { 
  if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {
      
      $path = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
      $title = drupal_get_title();   
 	if($path[2]) {
 	  $breadcrumb[] = l(ucfirst($path[1]), $path[1]);
 	  $breadcrumb[] = $title; 
        }
   return implode(' › ', $breadcrumb);
  }
}

Basically what this is doing is creating a breadcrumb trail based on the actual url that you are seeing in the browser...grabbed via the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variable. Then it separates the url path at the '/'.

This solved my problem. Hopefully it solves someone elses as well! I'd be interested in seeing other examples of how to use breadcrumbs with path aliasing.