Before getting into discussions on styling – which is mainly controlled by your WP theme – have you looked at the forum admin > components > SEO panel where you can decide which parts of the title to display and which ones to exclude? And set the delimiter to be used as well…?

and before making any sp theme changes, please be sure you have created a child theme or a custom theme…  ensures you dont lose any changes on updates…

Thanks for the reply so fast.

I wasn’t aware of these settings. (I have the same problem with an SMF board I run, feature settings deeply buried that I don’t even know about.)

I’d really want to wrap the forum name and the topic name with their own spans or divs, which these settings don’t support at all.And I can’t put simple HTML like
in the delimiter – it removes it.

Hmmm.I played with the check boxes. It doesn’t seem to let me suppress page title (the final vert bar delimited item). The thing I want to remove I can’t.

I guess I could hide the h1 page title or use the simplest format for it, and style the breadcrumbs to create a “title” for messages. The message title information wouldn’t appear in the same place but it would be physically closer to the message body (right above it) which might help users.

lots of options… not entirely sure what you want to do… 

you can adjust the template function to change what is shown… see:  https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/api/template-functions-and-the-api/display-template-functions/common-view/sp_breadcrumbs/

you can remove the forum home link (think that is what you mean by page title) by passing an empty link…

and as you  have indicated, you can also adjust the css… each element of the breadcrumbs is targetable…

both tweaking the template function and/or css would be best handled with a child theme or custom theme like I mentioned previously…

an alternate option would be to use a standard wp hook to tweak the breakcrumbs…  do you know how to use wp filters?  you would use ‘sph_BreadCrumbs’ without quotes and you can change whatever you like…

I was quite clear. Just follow this example. You’ve probably given me the direction to make this change but I would like to know that I’m doing the least effort approach.

A title for one topic is like this (from the screen shot example above):

How Attending a Seminar Pushed Me Over the $100k/Yr Mark | Getting Started and Beginner Support | Café Writer Discussions

So you’re displaying this stuff:

(topic-name) | (forum-name) | (Page Title)

And all of this stuff is wrapped as a string of text in an h1 tag and I can’t get at any of these individual components in order to style them.

So, I’d like to separate out these elements into their own divs or spans:

(topic name) printed out in a div or span of a particular class

(forum-name) printed out in a div or span of another class

(page title) printed out in yet another div or span of yet another class.

What’s the easiest/best approach for this?

perhaps I misunderstood…  thought you were talking about breadcrumbs…

but appears you are talking about the page header which is output by your wp theme and not us…  at least based on h1 tag comment, I think so… 

so we dont provide any markup for that since its done by the wp theme…  we do set the page meta head title tags with the info you mention (and now see what Andy was getting at), but its your wp theme that is choosing to output that for the page header… which frankly is unusual… typical its just the page title…

what you are asking to do to the page header is exactly what our breadcrumbs do…  typically you wouldnt want both the page header and the breadcrumbs…  we can control the breadcrumbs, but not the page header (again, wp theme)…

try going to forum – options – general display settings and try removing the page title completely… that is how the majority of simple press users operate…

if you really want that page header, you will need to adjust the wp theme…  as andy said, you have some flexibility with the seo options to tweak it, but you are really tweaking what we do to the meta title tags…  if the wp theme uses that for the page header (not really that abnormal), its up to the wp theme how it displays it…  and some themes, control how much we can even change the elements with in it…