Oct
30
2006
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.
Support, Bugfixes, and Future Development
jason342 asked in the forums about the information on the Pathauto Project Page that explains what happens with bugs in different versions of the module.
About bugs, you have to start with the knowledge that all non-trivial code has bugs. So, given that, the question is which versions get updated. For Pathauto, those versions are 4.7 and HEAD (5). If someone has a patch for 4.6 that fixes a big bug, I'll apply it. But I don't place a priority to spend my own time fixing bugs found in 4.6: basically, people should be moving to 4.7 or providing their own patches for 4.6.
About popularity, Pathauto is one of the top modules (based upon downloads) in Drupal. So, it's reasonable to say that it is popular!
I've been spending a solid day per month working on pathauto and a few hours sporadically beyond that. My time is a bottleneck on getting through the issue queue which demonstrates the importance of fileing good issue reports. There is a growing group of folks who have been helping out with bugs and features - groovy, cooperaj, drewish, thewhippingpost, sun, fgm, ashtonium, ednique, walkah, and several others. It's very helpful to have users who provide feedback on ideas and who help find bugs and test patches. Also, I'm actively seeking co-maintainers for the module because that is more reliable than just one person. If anyone is interested, let me know and I will give you CVS access. The best way to show your interest is simply to review issues in the issue queue, provide patches, and help respond to support questions.
In summary - write good issue reports and feature requests, bugs with patches will get fixed in 4.6, bugs that I understand as important will get fixed in 4.7, and new features will be implemented in the CVS-HEAD (which is Drupal5.x compatible).
New Features and Changes to Functionality
There are several new features that I hope to implement in the version of Pathauto for Drupal5. These range from are changes and improvements to existing functionality to making Pathauto a leaner and more consistent set of functionality.
Ignoring words - This is a great idea that pjb gave and which came from the URLify module. It allows the Pathauto administrator to specify a list of words that they want to be removed from the URL. So, if you have "A Long Title For The Node" then Pathauto used to just use all the words in the URL which could make the URL quite long. The improved version just makes the URL something like "long-title-node" which is great because the articles aren't important enough to be worth including in the URL. Shorter URLs are easier to remember and easier to include in emails. This is a great improvement.
Cleanstring - Pathauto, to deal with some of the unique characters used around the world, has a feature that "cleans the strings" by doing transliteration. For example, the letter Æ becomes Ae. This translation is difficult to get right and I've gone back and forth on this several times, but here's the basic situation: the PHP native iconv/translit solution may have problems but it is the easiest solution to maintain and any problems we find can be fixed in PHP where the benefits are enjoyed by a wide audience. We don't need to be reinventing the solution here. I do understand the benefit of a text file full of transliterations that would be easy for admins to edit and tweak for their site. If someone wants to implement that solution and provide a patch for it, that would be great. But I don't have the time or desire to implement it for myself.
Removing _pathauto_page Listings - This is a feature that basically nobody uses and that deserves to be removed. I've created an issue to track the removal where people can complain if they really really want it kept. Ideally I'd like someone to take it and turn it into a new module if they feel it is important.
Removing Index Aliases - Along the lines of the last note - the goal here is to get feedback about a part of the module that seems unpopular and which has been the source of many support issues. If you use this feature and want to see it stay in the module, please provide your insight.
Other random ideas - In the "not well formed" category of ideas are things like more standardized comments, some set of tests (using simpletest), and performance improvements - both in pathauto and in path.
Performance and Duplicate Content Issues
There are currently two major points that people will complain about and point at Pathauto as the source of the problem: Performance and Duplicate Content. The performance issue is simple: if you create hundreds (or thousands) of aliases your site will begin to slow down because every page view requires hundreds of checks to the url alises to see if an alias exists for a node. The duplicate content issue is both a search engine issue and a user issue, but the problem is that when using 1 path alias you now have two versions of each object: the internal value (like node/4) and the alias (like 'my-node-4-about-stuff'). It is confusing to users to have the same content on both of the aliases. Also, there is some consensus about a penalty in the search engines if you have duplicate content available on your site at multiple URLs which is an attempt to penalize people who create scraper sites built with boilerplate content. Hopefully in Drupal6 there will be more work towards the goal of conquering this problem so that Drupal can respond to multiple URLs for a piece of content but only one of those is visible to the user.
Last Words
In closing, Pathauto is a great module for Drupal that has been around for a very long time. It is an example of a high quality module that deserves and receives frequent updates and attention. About the seemingly prevalent confusion around Pathauto module the best way I know to prevent that is more discussion about it: like this post.
Comments
BryanSD writes:
I like this module and when I have had a need for it, I use it. However, in one of those recent posts about pathauto is the claim that:
Greg, from your perspective does this module really help with the search engines? From my own experience, especially with Google, I don't think pathauto really improves your site in the rankings. I'll argue that pathauto likely helps the human reader out more than the "automated" search bots.
I've had sites without pathauto rank higher in Google than I've had with sites using pathauto (or the equivalent in other CMS applications). Content seems to play a bigger role at Google than URL. I wouldn't mind hearing your take on this and others on this.
Greg writes:
That's a tricky question to try to answer because there are so many factors involved. As you've pointed out, some sites rank very well for terms even when they don't use path aliases.
My feeling is that it doesn't really matter whether it helps for SEO because the benefit to users is already known and highly valuable.