A module that I haven't been able to live without since I got into Drupal is called Menu Trails.

This module has been a lifesaver for me and a necessity on most all of my Drupal sites. One thing that I like to do on my Drupal sites is use Views to generate lists of nodes. Views makes that kind of stuff quick and easy. Menu trails fills a gap that, in my opinion, Drupal has completely left out. The Menu Trails module allows you to take node types and taxonomy vocabularies and automatically add them under a certain menu item (retaining breadcrumbs).

After reading that you might say, well that's easy... all I would have to do is type in the Menu Title and select the menu item that I want it to fall under. Well, not only does it save you the time in doing that each time you create a node it also saves your menu table on your database because it doesn't actually add a menu item for each one! The other cool thing that this does for you is helps you retain you breadcrumbs when you navigate to those content types.

The reason I came across this was because I had a News Page set up using views that would pull all of my nodes created with the "news" content type. When you click on the node title to view the full node it wouldn't give you a breadcrumb to go back to the News Page. When I saw this I was a little confused why it didn't do what I wanted it to. Personally, it would be nice if views would do this automatically, but views does enough already!

Unless this gets added into core I will always have this present in all of my Drupal installs. I can imagine that in some cases this won't be needed, but if you are creating custom content types it might just save you a load of time!

Project Page: http://drupal.org/project/menutrails