[support] Blogs: URL and Taxonomy questions

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting "Neil: esl-lounge.com" <neil at esl-lounge.com>:

> thanks for the answer Earnie.
>
>> Yes it is possible.  You need to turn on the path module and install
>> the pathauto [1] module.  Depending on how you setup pathauto for the
>> taxonomy terms you should be able to have what you want.
>
> Pathauto authors themselves suggest using views/args to achieve this. There
> used to be something called index aliases in PA but it's been deprecated.
>
> Another query about blog URLs: isn't it bad practice to set up blog URLs to
> use vocab terms?
>
> we use free tagging so users can append anything from 1-10 tags to each blog
> entry. Pathauto takes the first one and uses it in the URL so we may have a
> blog entry at:
>
> blog/385/my-first-job (using blog/[nid]/[term-raw] as our path)
>

At the node level I would use title and not [nid]/[term-raw].  You 
might consider even blog/[author-name]/[title].  Especially because of 
your next paragraph but I have a suggestion of that too.

I would use the category level to create paths for the terms.  Note 
that the word ``category'' is used incorrectly in the pathauto admin 
IMO.  It really means term.  Of course it is broader giving you a path 
to list all blogs with that term.  So blog/[cat-raw] would list all 
blogs with the term.

> but then Johnny User goes in and alters either the tags (quite likely) or
> the order of them (not very likely) and suddenly the URL changes and
> potentially many hardcoded links across the site, on our forum, etc, to that
> blog entry die a horrible death. It would be the same if we used the title
> of the blog in the URL.
>
> How do people cope with their users changing tags/titles if they use them in
> URL paths? Isn't it a total unmanageable nightmare?
>

Somewhere in the list of modules [1] for CCK there is a field type that 
allows you to enter a node reference.  Then you don't need a hard coded 
paths unless of course it is to an external reference and who knows 
there may be modules to control that as well.

[1] http://drupal.org/project/Modules

Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/
-- http://give-me-an-offer.com/