By jlin on

With path auto as a respected module that's recommended by every Drupal developer everywhere as a means to making websites make more sense to both users and web search engines, why oh why is drupal not using URL paths that make sense??

Instead of http://drupal.org/node/xxxxxx why don't we use properly named url's?

In the main handbook area, about one out of every 3 links lead to a mess of numbered nodes, and the other 2 lead to properly named pages.

If it is an issue related to performance, I don't see how we can't bring just the "important" or "public facing" pages, such as the Drupal Handbook's "Welcome README" in the About Drupal section (http://drupal.org/node/35172), into the current decade of proper urls.

Is it a matter of getting someone to type them in?

Jon

Comments

ceefour’s picture

ceefour commented

+1 for jlin.

It's been 3 (three!!) years, and I'm still wondering the same thing.

Path module are available for this SEO Permalink URLs job, and no need to manually type anything with Pathauto module.

Furthermore, GlobalRedirect module can redirect old cryptic URLs into new SEO-friendly URLs without any effort (e.g. so that Google recognizes the new URLs as "canonical" ones).

BTW these modules are a must on all my Drupal sites.

I'll definitely appreciate any enlightenment here. Thank you.

vm’s picture

vm commented

D.o does in some areas bot not in all. I'd believe this is to limit the amount of path aliases therefore limiting potential performance issues as drupal is highly used and has quite a few logged in users on the site at any given time.

ceefour’s picture

ceefour commented

A totally unrelated, but still in the user experience domain:

The comments form should be located below the content, and directly editable. No need for a separate page just to post a comment.

This is also simply a configuration task. It almost feels like drupal.org is running a "default" plain Drupal install without any best practices (or simply sane) tweaks.

vm’s picture

vm commented

There are many things going on with the drupal.org redesign. You should check out the redesign project to see if the changes you would like to see are included.