[development] Human readable taxonomy URLs

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Dries Buytaert wrote:
>
> Essentially you have to generate your URLs like this:
>
>     * <a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag"></a>
>     * <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag"></a>
>     * <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag"></a>
>
> If rel="tag" is specified, tools like technorati will use the last 
> word of the URL as being the tag (see 
> http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html).  The tags would be 
> respectively:
>
>     * ipod
>     * gravity
>     * chihuahua
>
> Drupal, however, generates:
>
>     * <a href="/taxonomy/term/15" rel="tag" title="">
>     * <a href="/taxonomy/term/16" rel="tag" title="">
>
> so microformat aware crawlers pick it up as being:
>
>     * 15
>     * 16
>
> When you use freetagging, like I do on my blog, having to map 
> 'taxonomy/term/15' on something crawler friendly like 'tag/drupal' is 
> kinda tiresome -- especially when you have many tags.  The current 
> user interface doesn't lend itself to this.

Right.

> Suggestions on how we can make this easier, and how we can make it so 
> that Drupal generates URLs can automatically take advantage of the 
> latest developments in microformats (like Technorati and shortly, 
> Microsoft)?
>
> Maybe there should be a checkbox in the taxonomy.module to 
> enable/disable the auto-generation of clean URLs?  Or maybe there 
> should be a better UI to mass alias taxonomy URLs?

You could look at pathauto module and see if it already provides 
automatic aliases for taxo terms. If it does not it should be fairly 
easy to add. I don't think that alias generation should be tied directly 
into taxonomy.module.

Cheers,
    Gerhard