 readme please read this file and also the installtxt they contain answers to many common questions if you are developing for this module the apitxt may be interesting if you are upgrading check the changelogtxt for major changes description the pathauto module provides support functions for other modules to automatically generate aliases based on appropriate criteria with a central settings path for site administrators implementations are provided for core content types nodes taxonomy terms and users including blogs and tracker pages pathauto also provides a way to delete large numbers of aliases this feature is available at administer site building url aliases delete aliases benefits besides making the page address more reflective of its content than node 138 it s important to know that modern search engines give heavy weight to search terms which appear in a page s url by automatically using keywords based directly on the page content in the url relevant search engine hits for your page can be significantly enhanced installation and upgrades see the installtxt file notices pathauto just adds url aliases to nodes users and taxonomy terms because it s an alias the standard drupal url for example node 123 or taxonomy term 1 will still function as normal if you have external links to your site pointing to standard drupal urls or hardcoded links in a module template node or menu which point to standard drupal urls it will bypass the alias set by pathauto there are reasons you might not want two urls for the same content on your site if this applies to you please note that you will need to update any hard coded links in your nodes or blocks if you use the system path ie node 10 for menu items and settings like that drupal will replace it with the urlalias for external links you might want to consider the path redirect or global redirect modules which allow you to set forwarding either per item or across the site to your aliased urls urls not getting replaced with aliases please bear in mind that only urls passed through drupal s l or url functions will be replaced with their aliases during page output if a module or your template contains hardcoded links such as href node node nid those won t get replaced with their corresponding aliases use the drupal api instead href url node node nid or l your link title node node nid see http apidrupalorg api head function url and http apidrupalorg api head function l for more information disabling pathauto for a specific node type or taxonomy when the pattern for a node type is left blank the default pattern will be used but if the default pattern is also blank pathauto will be disabled for that node type bulk updates must be run multiple times as of 5x2x pathauto now performs bulk updates in a manner which is more likely to succeed on large sites the drawback is that it needs to be run multiple times if you want to reduce the number of times that you need to run pathauto you can increase the maximum number of objects to alias in a bulk update setting under general settings wysiwyg conflicts fckeditor tinymce etc if you use a wysiwyg editor please disable it for the pathauto admin page failure to do so may cause errors about pregreplace problems due to the tag being added to the strings to replace see http drupalorg node 175772 credits the original module combined the functionality of mike ryan s autopath with tommy sundstrom s pathautomatic significant enhancements were contributed by jdmquin wwwbcdemsnet matt england added the tracker support other suggestions and patches contributed by the drupal community current maintainers greg knaddison http growingventuresolutionscom mike ryan http mikeryanname frederik freso s olesen http fresodk changes see the changelogtxt file id readmetxt v 116 20080621 182038 greggles exp  