Adrian Rossouw wrote:
One of the things we discussed doing once 4.8 is open, around the time of vancouver, was that in order to maintain an alias for each and every node, using the path table for that, was just not going to scale.
So, simply adding a 'path' column, which is in effect the preferred alias for that object, and then using a node_link($node) function (or just l($node->path)), would allow us to run modules like pathauto on very large production sites with thousands of nodes.
This is a faily simple, albeit fairly large patch. Do we have any volunteers / naysayers?
I have one request: When this goes in, ensure that modules can affect the generated URL. This is essential to being able to keep context on node views. Nodes often exist in more than one context (imagine the multi-parented book) but it's impossible to do the breadcrumbs right for it. However, if that context could be passed into the node, we could do some very cool stuff.