pURL in Drupal

I'd have an interest in something like this as well. There are a few ways I would envision this could work, but am curious if anyone out there has attempted this with Drupal before. Something like this could probably be done outside Drupal with subdomains also as another idea.

Have you seen the PathAuto module?
After you enable it you'll be able to go to Site Building -> URL Aliases -> Automated Alias Settings to set the URL for user profiles. You'll be able to use various tokens from nodes and users as part of the URL.

Anything started on the pURL front? We are definitely interested in this. Our purpose is mainly for response from a direct mail campaign. So, login for the pURL is not something we would most likely want. We would want the pURL to be generated in advance by loading data from an existing list of companies we would be sending a direct mail piece to.

First, I know this process will be refined and eventually become a lot more efficient - I'm totally sharing this in case someone has insight to do so - but this worked for me on a small campaign.

1. Created a Landing Page, in my case I created its own page-node-250.tpl.php file but one wouldn't have to.

2. In the content of my Landing Page, I have a PHP block that does this;

<?php
$fullname = explode(".", ltrim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'/'));
$firstname = $fullname[0];
$lastname = $fullname[1];
echo "$firstname";

Which is used in the body of the page to display the name of the person - this value is gleaned directly from the Pathauto alias as pURL accomplished in step 3. It wouldn't be too much to add a table to your database then continue this PHP script with mySQL queries that return the array of variables specific to that user. Setting up the presentation is exactly like setting up a variable data print piece in something like Fusion Pro for instance.

3. Sourced my data list from our Mail Dept to generate my pURLs using /Firstname.Lastname and with Pathauto module installed, I used PHPMyAdmin's SQL tool to inject the whole list of aliases like this;

INSERT INTO `database_url_alias` (`pid`, `src`, `dst`, `language`) VALUES ('190', 'node/250', 'John.Smith', ''),
('191', 'node/250', 'Jim.Boyd', '');

Really, that's it in three steps. I know it's basic and compared to other Drupal work it's cumbersome, but compared to other web development it's pretty straight forward. Looking at it, I think a combination of the Data module and Views module would eliminate the extra steps and provide a means to manage this through the Drupal interface.

Some immediate things I don't like about this pURL method;
1. Not tied to the user database for the site, doing that, pre-populating WebForm info from the user Contact Information could be done better integrated with Drupal, not to mention roles.
2. Reportage! I need tracking/reportage suggestions for this. I use the Core Optional right now, and it is a crude start. Our Webforms that are populated by the user are good though as I have found a workaround for using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and have the pURL/alias show in in the submission data.
3. EasyPurl uses what they call Business Rules to handle actions on the page with the variable values, and I think much of that is done manually in this could be done using Views, Rules, etc. that is then available through the Drupal interface.

Feedback and collaboration welcome!

This is an interesting topic.

My approach would be to harness and modify user profile pages with pathauto, token, etc... so that my profile would be example.com/users/awasson or perhaps example.com/awasson. I haven't checked to see how it reacts when I change the URL pattern to remove "users" but I don't see any reason why not.

Taking it a step further, I would use civiCRM or Drupal's Party CRM, RedHen, etc... so that I would have a real CRM on the back end to manage contact records and expose the fields I want to expose, allowing users to update and maintain the fields.

A few wants would be to set up the urls as subdomains so that my account would be at awasson.example.com. I haven't looked into that at all. Has anyone?

Also generating QR codes would be handy... Again, has anyone looked into this?

Further to that I would want to integrate some tracking. I suppose that could be handled via a custom module that creates a db table and tracks page impressions, referrers, etc...