22nd March 2012

Module: Extended path aliases (path to success!)

Alli Price
Developer

(Corny title, we know :) ) It's not often that we'd do a post on a single module, but today is that day...

Extended path aliases:
http://drupal.org/project/path_alias_xt

"Extended path aliases finishes the job left incomplete by core's Path module", it aliases paths like node/23/edit or user/14/my-favourites. This has long been a niggle with Drupal but a point that has been ignored. As developers it's understood why this happens but to a basic user it could be confusing to see the URL change between viewing and editing. By simply installing this module aliases appear! Wonderful!

It has a release for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

A possible use cases would be that you have a community site where users can build up a profile. A user will have an aliased path (users/alli-price), and we've added on extra tabs with views, for example there's a view with the path user/%/favourites.

This will create an extra tab on the users profile, and will resolve it's URL to be user/(uid)/favourites. With path_alias_xt installed, this would now be users/alli-price/favourites.

This module is not only a win for filling a long standing void in core and URL aliases, but also ensures better consistency for outward facing URLs, being a win for SEO. Highly recommended!