One of the things that makes Drupal a great CMS is the quality and robustness of its modules. Today I wanted to shine a spotlight on the Pathauto module. From Pathauto’s project page;
“The Pathauto module automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to have URL aliases like /category/my-node-title instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system that uses tokens which the administrator can change.”
Tokens require the Token module, which you’ll likely need anyway, because it’s required by many modules. You also should really install Redirect, so that whenever an item’s URL alias is changed, the system will automatically created a redirect (so you don’t start racking up 404 errors). After installing Drupal core, we ALWAYS install Pathauto, Token, and Redirect at a minimum; they are that essential.
Now let’s stop and think for a moment why we might want to be able to set URL patterns. Imagine you have a blog and you want to control the URL pattern.
Custom URL patterns in WordPress and Joomla
In WordPress you can adjust the Permalinks, and it does offer an option called Custom Structure with token-like placeholders. This is rather limited though in terms of the available placeholders. You can of course change the slug (a.k.a. alias) for each individidual post/page/category manually, but that’s silly to even contemplate on large sites. Long story short, there’s no WordPress equivalent for defining across-the-board URL patterns with ease the way that you can with Drupal’s Pathauto module.
We have had to deal with URL patterns in Joomla before as well. That can be a frustrating experience on larger sites, because Joomla relies so heavily on its menu system, meaning a page must be in a menu for its URL alias to be set to what you want. You can set up categories and subcategories, which Joomla will use for the generated URLs. There have been attempts at making Joomla’s URL structure more customizable (sh404sef comes to mind here), but these are complex and they take over some core functionality, making it incredibly difficult to uninstall should you decide to uninstall it later on. And they never quite offer the same level of control and ease of use that Pathauto does.
Pathauto Example
Let’s start with the Pathauto admin screen:
The above screenshot is from Drupal 8, but it’s pretty much the same in Drupal 7. It shows a few URL patterns tied to specific content types, followed by a default of [node:title]. This means that if I add a node such as News that has no pattern defined, it will still get an SEO-friendly URL based on its title, so if its title is “My Great News Item”, its URL would be “/my-great-news-item”. But if it’s a picture with title of “Our New Gallery”, it would be “/pictures/our-new-gallery”.
Pathauto is really great in combination with Views, specifically Views page displays. In the screenshot above you see we have a content type called Person, with a URL pattern of “bios/[node:title]”. We also have a view page display with URL of “/bios”. So visitors go to “/bios” and then they click on a bio, and that bio will follow the above URL pattern. Using Pathauto and Views together in this manner we can enforce consistent URL patterns across the site, without forcing editors to think about URLs as they’re editing. It just works.
If you want to show ‘breadcrumbs’ e.g. “Home > Bios > Some Person”, the Pathauto/Views combination is particularly useful when combined with Easy Breadcrumb. It relies on your URL patterns for generating its breadcrumbs.
While we use Pathauto primarily for nodes (content / pages), it can also be used for users, taxonomy, and other Drupal entities. I highly recommend it and consider it essential to any Drupal site.