Why You Should Use Pathauto (or at least Path Aliases for Many Pages)

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is "Why should I use Pathauto? If I don't care about SEO is there any other reason?"

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don't look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like "hackable urls" do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create "hackable URLs" that are valuable to a user. A "hackable url" or "index alias" is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

Site Credibility Prior to the Click

I frequently get URLs sent to me via email and IM. Compare these two URLs:

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/node/38

vs.

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/our-sponsors

Which one are you more likely to click on? Which one helps you understand what content you are going to get before you even get there?

Easy to Remember URLs

Let's face it, unless you are a really passionate individual you just aren't going to spend your day memorizing node numbers on your site. But, there is a good chance that you can remember the words in the title that become part of the URL. It's much easier to know that http://example.com/about is the page and not http://example.com/node/312

Reliable Module - Easy to Use

For almost 1 year and 11 months now I've been working on Pathauto as the maintainer. A few months ago Freso started helping out a ton in the issue queue. There are several other people (notably steamedpenguin and the module's original author mikeryan) helping out in the issue queue. So, the "bus factor" and the "mean time to issue response" on the module are both very good.

The hot new releases of Pathauto for Drupal 6.x and 5.x are very stable. Very, very stable. The 6.x branch even has some basic testing via the SimpleTest module.

You can argue that it's not easy enough to use. Well, there are several issues in the issue queue related to that which will be addressed in the 6.x-2.x release of Pathauto. If you'd like to help with ideas on how to improve the UI please jump in!