Seacoast Meetup: Tuesday, March 20th, Durham

Great point Bob, thanks!

Here's the brief summary:
The purpose of the Regenerate Aliases By Taxonomy module is to allow the admin to select a Taxonomy (vocab, term, sub-term) and regenerate the PathAuto aliases just for nodes with that Taxonomy. It also gives a field to specifically list node id's to update instead, for more granular control.

Here are more details about when this module would be useful:

Many Drupal sites use Taxonomy to organize groups of nodes, and then use the PathAuto module to build URL aliases based on that Taxonomy. For example:

Taxonomy = Vocab: Fruit Term: Citrus Sub-Term: Orange
Taxonomy = Vocab: Fruit Term: Citrus Sub-Term: Lime

This would result in two url aliases:
mysite.com/fruit/citrus/orange
mysite.com/fruit/citrus/lime

The Challenge arises when you change the Taxonomy for a page. The aliases will not automatically be regenerated when the Taxonomy is changed, so the URL will no longer match the categorization of the node.

For example: In the Taxonomy above change the term "Fruit" to "Color". This will change the categorization of the nodes for "Orange" and "Lime", but the PathAuto aliases that were generated will not be updated.
It is possible to use the Contest management admin page to perform a bulk "update url alias", but this regenerates all aliases using PathAuto, overwriting any custom aliases that were manually set. On a large site, this can be a real headache.

The purpose of the Regenerate Aliases By Taxonomy module is to allow the admin to select a Taxonomy (vocab, term, sub-term) and regenerate the PathAuto aliases just for nodes with that Taxonomy. It also gives a field to specifically list node id's to update instead, for more granular control.

I hope this makes sense! I created the module at work to overcome a specific challenge with our site, but I think that it could potentially be useful in broader contexts, but that's certainly open for discussion on Tuesday. See you there! ~ Kevin