With Crumbs, you can specify token patterns to define parent paths for nodes, users and taxonomy terms (and maybe more in the future).
Admin page:
Admin > Structure > Crumbs > Entity parent > Node | User | Taxonomy term
You can specify a parent path pattern for each node type, vocabulary and user role.
Hint: "Entity token" module helps a lot!
Examples
(besides these settings you will also need to do some views configuration, to actually set up these pages)
Events
Desired breadcrumb:
Home > Board of directors > Meetings > Annual meeting 2013
(front) > board> board/meetings> node/456
Solution:
Pattern for parent path on "Event": board/meetings
News by date (*)
Desired breadcrumb:
Home > News > 2013 > April > 24 > New record-breaking figures
(front) > news> news/2013> news/2013/04> news/2013/04/24> node/123
Solution:
Pattern for parent path on "Article": news/[node:created:custom:Y/m/d]
Organic groups
Desired breadcrumb:
Home > Community > City groups > Aachen > Discussions > Let's go climbing
(home) > community> community/city-groups> node/888> node/888/forum> node/9125
Solution:
Pattern for parent path on "City group": community/city-groups
Pattern for parent path on "Group discussion": node/[node:og-group-ref:nid]/forum
That's it?
It is likely that you don't need to do anything else to get those breadcrumbs working.
This is thanks to some useful default behavior:
If none of the Crumbs plugins has any opinion on what the parent path should be, then Crumbs will simply chop off the last fragment of the path, and try if that works.
E.g.:community is the natural parent of community/city-groups.board is the natural parent of board/meetings.
This always works natively for the system path, and:
With the "path" plugin, this behavior is extended to path aliases.
Besides, there is still the "menu.hierarchy" plugin. You probably have a menu set up somewhere, that defines the hierarchy for most static pages.
(*) Disclaimer:
You probably want to use Views for pages like news/2013/04/24.
This is absolutely fine, but you may run into issues like this: #1914718: Crumbs on Views with Arguments/Contextual Filters
The problem: Views may not set a title for those pages.
And Crumbs will skip all breadcrumb items that don't have a title.