[Know a Module #2] Pathauto

Drupal core comes with the Path module included. Path provides readable URL's for your website, this helps your SEO, your image and how memorable a URL can be. This is an excerpt from Path's project page at Drupal.org:

For example, assume you want to post your resume for potential employers. Without the paths module enabled, the URL to view your resume would be something like yourdomain.com/node/view/26. Using this module, you could create a new URL to your resume such as yourdomain.com/my/resume or yourdomain.com/resume.html.

This module is extremely helpful for SEO, as it can include important keywords in the URL of your website. This is very important in order to place well in the search engine listings.

Let's say that you have a post "10 jquery slideshow plugins" and without path it would read yourdomain.com/node/154, nobody wants that, if you thought it didn't matter, now you know. If you're blogging, you want to include those important words in the URL, added to that, you want to include a reference to the date when your article was posted, for example: yourdomain.com/blog/02162010/10-jquery-slideshow-plugins. It can become very tricky to ensure that this pattern is always followed in sites where a lot of content is pushed in, specially by multiple users. Irregular patterns will produce irregular results, so the solution is simple, Pathauto.

Pathauto's nature is almost self-explanatory. You create URL patterns for each content type to ensure that the path for every post is nice and clean. A pattern uses replacement tokens (kindly provided by the token module). This means that when you are editing the pathauto pattern for your "article" content type, you can do articles/[mm][dd][yy]/[title-raw] and each time a post is created, it will fill in the blanks for you.

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