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Please read this file and also the INSTALL.txt.

They contain answers to many common questions.

If you are developing for this module, the API.txt may be interesting.

If you are upgrading, check the CHANGELOG.txt for major changes.

** Description:

The Pathauto module provides support functions for other modules to

automatically generate aliases based on appropriate criteria, with a

central settings path for site administrators.

Implementations are provided for core entity types: content, taxonomy terms,

and users (including blogs and forum pages).

Pathauto also provides a way to delete large numbers of aliases.  This feature

is available at  Administer > Configuration > Search and metadata > URL aliases

> Delete aliases.

** Benefits:

Besides making the page address more reflective of its content than

"node/138", it's important to know that modern search engines give

heavy weight to search terms which appear in a page's URL. By

automatically using keywords based directly on the page content in the URL,

relevant search engine hits for your page can be significantly

enhanced.

** Installation AND Upgrades:

See the INSTALL.txt file.

** Notices:

Pathauto just adds URL aliases to content, users, and taxonomy terms.

Because it's an alias, the standard Drupal URL (for example node/123 or

taxonomy/term/1) will still function as normal.  If you have external links

to your site pointing to standard Drupal URLs, or hardcoded links in a module,

template, content or menu which point to standard Drupal URLs it will bypass

the alias set by Pathauto.

There are reasons you might not want two URLs for the same content on your

site. If this applies to you, please note that you will need to update any

hard coded links in your content or blocks.

If you use the "system path" (i.e. node/10) for menu items and settings like

that, Drupal will replace it with the url_alias.

For external links, you might want to consider the Path Redirect or

Global Redirect modules, which allow you to set forwarding either per item or

across the site to your aliased URLs.

URLs (not) Getting Replaced With Aliases:

Please bear in mind that only URLs passed through Drupal's l() or url()

functions will be replaced with their aliases during page output. If a module

or your template contains hardcoded links, such as 'href="node/$node->nid"'

those won't get replaced with their corresponding aliases. Use the

Drupal API instead:

* 'href="'. url("node/$node->nid") .'"' or

* l("Your link title", "node/$node->nid")

See http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/function/url and

http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/function/l for more information.

** Disabling Pathauto for a specific content type (or taxonomy)

When the pattern for a content type is left blank, the default pattern will be

used. But if the default pattern is also blank, Pathauto will be disabled

for that content type.

** Credits:

The original module combined the functionality of Mike Ryan's autopath with

Tommy Sundstrom's path_automatic.

Significant enhancements were contributed by jdmquin @ www.bcdems.net.

Matt England added the tracker support (tracker support has been removed in

recent changes).

Other suggestions and patches contributed by the Drupal community.

Current maintainers:

  Dave Reid - http://www.davereid.net

  Greg Knaddison - http://www.knaddison.com

  Mike Ryan - http://mikeryan.name

  Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen - http://freso.dk