[development] Pathauto scaleability - path column in node / user table

[Jeremy Epstein]

On 5/9/06, Earl Miles <merlin at logrus.com> wrote:
> But this also leaves out 'user' and any other non-node object that may
> want URLs of this nature.

In order for (potentially) any object to manage its own primary
aliases, I think we need a hook_path(). I really do. Modules would
simply implement this hook by returning, say, the table and the field
where the path is stored. I guess they'd also return the URL fragment
that is their 'realm' - for node, this would be 'node' (since all node
paths are in the form 'node/x'). E.g.:

function node_path() {
  return array('table' => 'node', 'field' => 'path', 'path' => 'node');
}

Or perhaps we could even accomplish this without a _path() hook, by
using hook_db_rewrite_sql()? It's about time that we added path
support to this hook anyway. Particularly if we modified this hook to
support SELECT and other clauses (see <http://drupal.org/node/60853>),
it could work.

I love the idea - allowing modules to manage their own paths. But it
has to be implemented so that any module can manage its own paths, not
just node module.

Cheers,
Jaza.