Pathauto

Pathauto is a must have for any community or larger site project that will use url aliases.

The Drupal path module maintains a dictionary of url aliases to create custom urls. To use the path module by itself, each path must be manually entered by the node author. It is not realistic that community authors will do this correctly. Pathauto solves this problem by enabling the admin to specify path patterns that are automatically generated for various types of content.

Pros

Cons

- Not needed if you are not doing custom aliases.
- Not really needed if you have a small brochureware site that does not need to support multiple authors

Tips

Pathauto enables you to enter patterns for every type of node view and several user, categories and blog and forum views. However for custom nodes, only a node view pattern can be specified. Many custom nodes will also have a page/list view which will not show up in the pathauto admin. There is an api though that enables you to create additional pattern inputs.

Pathauto works closely with token. By adding custom tokens via the token api, you can get additional variables to build your dynamic patterns.