Renaming the Path URL in Drupal 5

Renaming the path to be more friendly (friendly URLs) in the URL is generally good practice. It's good for the user and it's good for search engines. By default, Drupal uses it's own naming for the path... node... this is not good.

Wouldn't it be better if you could rename the path so it shows the actual name of the article? With the Path module, which is part of the Drupal core, you can do this.

The first thing you'll need to do is make sure clean urls are enabled. The path module will not work properly without this enabled. I have an earlier post showing how to enable clean urls if you are not sure what I mean.

The first thing you need to do is enable the Path module. This is off by default.

That's it! Now when you go to edit an article, you'll see a new field called URL field settings. All you need to do is type in the name of the path you would rather have than node/1. The path for that posting is now what you typed in. Pretty easy.

There is another module out there that will do this automatically. I'll have a video on that soon. But in the meantime... now you know how to rename those paths in Drupal.