I've been reading all I could "search" up on this topic, but I still have a couple questions on the subject if I may.

I understand that if I enable friendly urls (or clean urls?) I then have to make paths or catagories for them for example: /blog or /reviews or /story. Then when I create content I can choose which to put the new content in. That's right, right? But do I have to go back and edit all (the paths) of stories I already wrote if I"d like them to be friendly as well?

And if I get all the old content urls renamed, will the links referenced on other sites etc to the old type urls still work?

So, if I understand all I have to do is recompile apache with --enable-rewrite, make sure it's enabled in the httpd.conf, turn clean urls on in drupal, make my paths?

thanks for your time,
-susan

Comments

srlinuxx’s picture

That wasn't as bad as I thought. It seems to be working good. But it seems to have slowed the site down just hair or two.

Do you think enabling caching might help speed things back up some?

media girl’s picture

Pathauto.module will do this automatically for you. Check out the downloads page. (This also requires that you enable the path module in your admin/module settings.)

BTW, be careful enabling clean urls. It's good to have two windows of your settings page open when you try this. If you're config is wrong, or mod_rewrite not working, you will get an error, and often hitting the "back" button will not reload the old page. There are workarounds to dig back in, but I find it easiest just to have the stable settings open in a separate window.
--
mediagirl.org

Jaza’s picture

There are four levels of "friendliness" that you can imbue in your Drupal URLs. Which level (or combination of levels) you choose depends on your own needs, as well as how much effort you (and your users/admins) can/will spend on URL maintenance. These levels (which I just thought of now - not official or anything!) are:

  1. Hide the ?q=.
    This is a simple matter of enabling the mod_rewrite support in your Drupal site settings. URLs of the form mysite.com/?q=/node/19 will instead be mysite.com/node/19. No aliasing or URL maintenance needed. See the clean URLs handbook entry for details.
  2. Alias only important pages.
    Instead of having to alias every node on your site, just alias the important ones. E.g. your site may have a 'contact us' page, so you would alias node/22 as contact, for example. Volume content, such as blog entries and news stories, would still just have URLs of the form node/x. See the URL aliasing handbook entry for details.
  3. Alias all pages.
    So every page's URL is "x" instead of node/x. E.g., your blog page might be aliased as "johnnysblog", and an actual blog entry might be "trip_to_disneyland_mar2005". Same as option 2, except that maintenance is ongoing and a bit tedious.
  4. Implement hierarchical aliasing.
    With this feature, the example "trip_to_disneyland_mar2005" (from above) would automatically become "johnnysblog/trip_to_disneyland_mar2005". This is not currently a feature that Drupal offers, but if you check out the hierarhical aliasing forum topic, you'll see that I've written a patch to make this possible for those that really need it. This gives your site the ultimate in user-friendly URLs: every URL is meaningful, and is presented in a meaningful context of its parent terms. But it's certainly not what every site needs (or what everyone wants).

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

srlinuxx’s picture

Wow, thanks for that wonderful explanation. I've done number 1 for now, but I'll certainly read up on the links you provided.

thanks jaza and media girl. :)

--You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?

kenorb’s picture