Disabling the breadcrumb navigation in Drupal for content pages

Breadcrumbs are one of the more controversial navigation elements in Drupal. Having a "you are here" trail of links at the top of the page is surely helpful for forums and administrative pages, where the user often navigates up and down in a hierarchy of pages.
However, when it comes to things like blogs, which are not hierarchically organized, breadcrumbs are not useful at all. They Generally look out of place and might even confuse visitors, who are not familiar with Drupal. In such cases, removing breadcrumbs altogether seems to be the most user friendly choice. Unfortunately, the website administration interface does not offer a checkbox for disabling them.

The most common advice to get rid of breadcrumbs is simply to remove them on the theme layer. On the theme layer, it's just a matter of locating the variable $breadcrumb in the template file and commenting out its according print statement. However, thats the steamroller tactics and has a number of disadvantages:

• It's an all or nothing approach. You might want to keep breadcrumbs on certain types of pages.
• Finding and commenting out the correct line in a theme is a tedious thing to do, especially since that line differs from theme to theme.
• Themes must be edited again, after being updated. This is annoying, when using themes which are in active development.
• If you happen to have a site, where users may choose their theme, the last two problems multiply.

Since I don't like messing around with other people's files, I wrote a simple helper module to solve the problem. You can download it here.

The module does not have an UI. Just download and extract it into your modules folder, than enable it like any other module. Afterwards, breadcrumbs will be suppressed except for forums and administrative pages.