Pathauto Patterns

Pathauto uses a combination of plain text and tokens to set up URL naming patterns to follow. For instance, you can set up a pattern for naming the path of all new article pages to be [node:content-type]/[node:title] so that you automatically get something like article/my-first-article, as shown in Figure 7-8.

The bits of text in square brackets are placeholders for the Token module mentioned earlier. You can use different patterns for each unique content type or vocabulary if you choose. For example, basic pages could use a pattern of [node:title], since they’re generally things like About Us and there’s no need to specify “page/” in front of it. Pathauto also has configurable default patterns that will be applied if you don’t make specific choices. You can decide things like how long your alias is allowed to be, what kind of separator you would like to use in the place of spaces or punctuation, and which common, short words you want to remove (e.g., a, and, in, etc.) from the path. In addition to making these automatic aliases upon creation of new content, Pathauto can also update all of your existing content so that your entire site uses the same pattern, even if that content was created prior to your turning on the Pathauto module.