Pathologic

Garrett Albright - April 15, 2008 - 01:17

Pathologic is an input filter for Drupal which attempts to make sure that links to other content in your Drupal installation, as well as images and other media, will always work correctly; the links won't "break" in situations which would otherwise cause them not to work. Maybe it could be explained better by listing some situations where Pathologic would come in handy…

  • You run a personal site, and the address of your site recently changed. Perhaps you moved to a shiny new domain name, or perhaps you moved the Drupal installation from one subdirectory to another. Now all the images in your content are broken, as well as links to other content on your site. You could go through all your content and update all the links… or you could install Pathologic.
  • You oversee a site which has testing and production servers. Copy-editors (and/or you) edit content on the testing server, and that eventually gets pushed over to the production server. When those darn editors link to other content on the site, they sometimes link to the version of it that's up on the test server; these links break when the content is published on the production server. You could flog the editors (and/or yourself) with a bullwhip for each infraction… or you could install Pathologic.
  • Your Drupal site has been up for a while, but you've recently discovered the Clean URLs feature and enabled it. Your links still work, but they still have that ugly "?q=" thing in them, and you have better things to do with your time than go through all your content to prettify the links. Or maybe you're going the other way; you used to have Clean URLs enabled, but you've had to disable it, and now your links are broken. Pathologic to the rescue!
  • Your site content uses relative paths (eg, <a href="tag/food/pizza"> which break for people reading your site's feed. You could just start using absolute paths instead, but you're too set in your ways and would rather have a tool do it for you.

Pathologic is designed to be a simple, set-it-and-forget-it utility. You don't need to type any special "tags" or special characters in your content to trigger Pathologic to work; it finds paths it can manage in your content automatically.

Full installation and configuration instructions can be found here.

Releases

Official releasesDateSizeLinksStatus
6.x-1.1-beta62008-May-108.8 KBRecommended for 6.xThis is currently the recommended release for 6.x.
5.x-1.1-beta62008-May-108.79 KBRecommended for 5.xThis is currently the recommended release for 5.x.
 
 

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