First off, crumbs are organized in a tree. The base of the tree is 'home', which is the front page. Every crumb has a unique key for itself and one (only one) parent. Each crumb is also defined as having a default English title and a link to its page.
In the relevent crumbs definition files (cgi-bin/crumbs.pl and crumbs-local.pl) you will find the hashes that define the crumbs. If you want to add a new crumb, you need to add it to one of these files. Note that crumbs in crumbs-local.pl will override crumbs in crumbs.pl. Files from ljcom NEED to have their crumbs put into crumbs-local.pl.
The hashes are organized as so:
'unique_key' => [ 'Title of Crumb', '/some/page.bml', 'my_parent' ]
That's a static crumb. Once you've defined one of those in the relevant Perl file, you can then tell LiveJournal to display that crumb on a BML page by using this code:
LJ::set_active_crumb('unique_key');
Run that anywhere inside of a BML page's code block. If you have a page that doesn't have a code block, you should insert one in the following manner:
<?_code
return LJ::set_active_crumb('unique_key');
_code?>
There is also the capability to insert dynamic crumbs. If you wish to have a crumb title reflect something like "Support Request #1784835" then you will need to use a dynamic crumb. You can use it something like this:
LJ::set_dynamic_crumb(BML::ml('
Notice that we call BML::ml. This means that the crumb title can be pulled from the translation database, and you can still stick in the data that you want.
I think that's about it. Let me know if there are any questions, or if any of this is unclear. Thanks!
Update: I forgot to mention. When you edit the crumbs files, you need to put them into the translation database. This is, as you probably expected, done with bin/upgrading/texttool.pl. In specific, there is a new "loadcrumbs" option as well as a "wipecrumbs" option.
The easiest way is to do:
bin/upgrading/texttool.pl load
If you use loadcrumbs instead of load, make sure to also use the makeusable mode so that the crumbs really show up on the site.