Posted by greggles on October 21, 2007 at 7:56pm
In reviewing old bugs I dug up: feed aliases don't get updated following normal "update action" settings.
But I'm not sure how this should behave.
One theory is that it should follow the update action because that's what the admin specified.
Another is that it should simply follow the "create new alias in addition to old one" style pattern so that old feed readers won't lose the feed.
Thoughts? "Yet Another Option" doesn't feel very good.
Comments
How often does this come up?
How often does this come up? If a new alias is created in addition to the old one, will both the feed aliases be updated with new items?
I am on the fence, though it would seem to me that encouraging forethought in creating one's feeds is the way to go. If, for some reason, one feels the need to change their feed alias, the reasoning behind it is probably important enough to scrap the old feed alias.
As far as I can tell, these are mostly aesthetic anyhow, since they will not be interacting with this alias very much after subscribing. If that happens to be true, and one is creating a lot of feeds, then it may be better to keep the number of aliases lower. Imagine a year's worth of content with comment feeds changing the pattern and being duplicated.
yeah, that's the dilemma
The feed aliases are not just major things, but every single blog on a site. If you have a site with lots of users who are able to blog, that's a lot of feeds. Exactly as you say, what if a few hundred users update their usernames every year, for example. It's not just a matter of forethought by site admins, but of users who may not even know that Drupal is running the site much less Pathauto creating aliases for it.
I'm not sure just how extensive the problem is now, but I would say yes, imagine that it impacts every update of user and taxonomy and node objects.
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Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log | The Big Spanish Tour
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Would "Global Redirect" help
The http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect module ensures that a node has one path. I don't know if you would help the situation or not for the feeds.
kinda
global redirect only ensures that there a node has one externally visible path. AFAIK it doesn't actually do any magic to reduce the aliases in the url_alias table which is what I'm really concerned about. I don't think duplicate external URLs for /feed pages are confusing search engines about this.
Note also that there is an issue, with patch, that could help this situation: If path redirect is installed provide new update option "Make old alias a redirect and create new one".
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Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log | The Big Spanish Tour
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation