Improving Drupal’s Clean URLs with the Pathauto Module

This tutorial was requested by a student who is learning the Drupal basics. They turned on “Clean URLs” in the Drupal admin area and were surprised to see that the URLs remained largely unchanged:

• Old: /?q=node/3
• New: /node/3

The student’s comment was:

“that’s still a silly address for my About Us page. I want the address to be /about-us/.”

We also tried to help them by turning on the Path module in the Drupal core. That allowed them to create URLs like /about-us/ however they still needed to think about it and ask their users to create a path every time. They wanted something that would create great URLs automatically.

The solution is the “Pathauto” module and let’s show you how to set it up:

Installing Pathauto to Your Drupal Site

In fact, we’re going to install two modules because Pathauto also requires the “Token” module.

• Step 1: Go to Administer >> Site configuration >> Clean URLs to check that they are enabled.
• Step 2: Click here to download the latest version of “Pathauto” and click here for “Token”.
• Step 3: Extract the files into a two folders on your desktop. One  folder will be called “pathauto” and the other “token”.
• Step 4: Login to your site’s files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn’t a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
• Step 5: Upload the “sections” folder to /sites/all/modules/
• Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. You’ll need to check four boxes:

  

• Step 7: Go and create a new node. When you do, you should notice a new area labelled “URL path settings”. If you leave “Automatic alias” checked, the address of the page will likely be your Page title in this format:
  /content/your-page-title/

  

Configuring Pathauto

The default Pathauto setting might not be to everyone’s taste:

• You may want to use underscores _ instead of dashes as this student did.
• You may want to remove /content/ so that you really can have pages with the address /about-us/ rather than /content/about-us/

To change the settings, go to Administer >> Site building >> URL aliases >> Automated Alias Settings:

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