[development] Re: [infrastructure] Drupal.org should have better URL aliases

[Dries Buytaert]

> To Adrian's point, node IDs aren't useful to your casual web  
> visitor. Therefore Drupal distros should default to include and  
> have enabled pathauto and perhaps follow the WordPress model (the  
> only model with which I'm familiar; if another system is better,  
> I'd be interested in its structure as well).

I think WP doesn't use an intermediate table that contains (source  
URL, destination URL)-tuples.  Instead, it directly translates the  
URL to a database query that looks up the post.

Drupal:
  + Any URL can be aliased, not just those related to posts.
  + Any URL can have multiple aliases: 'team', 'about' and 'about-us'  
can point to the same page or content.  (A bad idea as Google will  
penalize you for this.)
  - Performance penalty when URL aliases are enabled; up to 100+  
queries/page.  These queries are very fast though.
  + Very fast when URL aliases are disabled.

WordPress:
  - Only some URLs can be aliased.
  - Limited to one alias per post.
  + Small performance penalty.
  - Not as fast as Drupal when URL aliases are disabled.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/