Pathauto Tips and Hints

Before using pathauto, pay some attention to the fields under 'General settings' at ..admin/build/path/pathauto. Configuring those settings can make life a little easier when pathauto starts generating aliases based on the node types or nodes you create.

Here are a couple of tips to begin with:

• Verbose option
  Turn this on to have pathauto print out messages to the screen each time an alias is generated. This will help you keep track of the aliases being generated and alert you to potential bugs and errors in the way pathauto is functioning.
• Update action
  Turn on the 'Create a new alias, replacing the old one' radio button instead of the default 'Do nothing, leaving the old alias intact'. This can prevent a lot of confusion and save you additional work in many circumstances.

  For example, let's say you are creating a vocabulary with a hierarchical taxonomy structure of one or many parent term(s) and many child term(s) under each parent. It is all too common to forget to choose the right parent for the child term(s) you are creating. If the 'Update action' setting is set to the 'Do nothing...' setting, pathauto will NOT generate a new alias even after you edit the child term(s) to have the right parent.

• Use The -raw Tokens
  Pathauto uses the Token module to provide the little strings of text which are replaced. Because Token is used by many other modules it has to provide tokens and help text which make sense for all of those modules. However, for Pathauto you should use the -raw tokens. So, if you were using the [user] token or think that might be the right one, instead you should use [user-raw].

Preventing a Content Type from Getting Aliased

If you want to keep a certain content type from having aliases, you should remove the Default Path Pattern in the Node Path Settings section, and then explicitly specify something for all the content types except the one you wish to ignore. In other words, clear the default field and your problems will go away.