A little while ago I got interviewed by Ben Finklea who produces the SpryDev SEO Podcast.

One of the Drupal modules that I maintain is the Pathauto Module which automatically creates user-and-search-engine-friendly aliases for your Drupal paths.

We've been in hiring mode for a while now. As most any Drupal Service provider will tell you, there's big demand for people and companies that have an expertise in Drupal. There's also a bit of a shortage of people to satisfy that demand. We've decided on a strategy of hiring great people regardless of Drupal experience and then getting them plugged into the "Drupal way" of doing things as quickly as we can.

This morning I woke up to a very nice bit of news: Drupal 5.0 has been released.

We use Drupal for lots of our projects and are active contributors of patches and modules for Drupal. So it's really nice when the latest version with all the new features and bugfixes is released. The release announcement lists all the great new features by the categories of Usability Improvements, New Features, and "For developers". And being a firm focused on design and development, we're excited by all three.

Background and Motivation

On a recent Drupal project we had to change course part way through implementation. This could have resulted in lots of extra work, but a little use of the Drupal API and database knowledge saved some serious time.

Initially we wanted to hide the content so we made the default publishing options for the content be "in moderation" and "not published". This worked fine until we needed to allow non-administrators to get access to these pieces of content. So, we needed to use a Drupal node access module to provide that restriction and decided on the well tested Taxonomy Access Control module working in concert with the Taxonomy Defaults module.

Many Drupal users are confused by the Pathauto module's purpose and functions. There have been a couple of posts recently talking about Pathauto so I figured I would answer some questions, correct some common mis-beliefs, and provide some insight into a sort of roadmap for Pathauto.

History and How I got involved.

Kathy Sierra says to stick this at the end or in an appendix. So, read the README.txt. Bottom line - other people have done lots of great work on Pathauto. More recently I contributed a patch, Mike Ryan said something like "you maintain it", so that's more or less how I've come to be the current maintainer.