how many of your aliases are manually created?

In Pathauto 5.x-2.0 you now have the option (if you have the permission to create aliases) to tell Pathauto not to do its job and instead to let you set the path alias.

There is a new feature in the 2.x development branch of Pathauto which keeps track of whether the admin created the alias or not. If it appears to Pathauto that the admin created the alias, then Pathauto will not try to alias the object in the future.

So,

• create (or edit) a node and uncheck the box for "Automatic alias"
• edit the node again and submit - pathauto will remember your setting from last time and not create an alias for this node
• as a user who does not have permission to create alias, edit the node and submit, Pathauto checks and remembers the setting from step 1 and not create an alias for the node

I think this is the desired behavior, but it has a drawback: we don't know the setting from step 1 for all aliases created before 5.x-2.1 so Pathauto assumes it should not create aliases whenever aliases from before 5.x-2.1 were created.

Proposal During the upgrade process Pathauto could run a query that would just create records for all old aliases and say "we assume that all nodes, users, and taxonomy objects were aliased by Pathauto" and therefore update them in the future normally. We can further instruct users in how to edit the table to mark them as admin maintained if the admin wants to prevent Pathauto form overwriting their work.

Benefits of this new database table include faster bulk deletes, more granular bulk deletes (i.e. just aliases created by pathauto), and eventually that it can be migrated to the core url_alias table and we won't have this problem :)

I'm inclined to follow my proposal since this is basically what we have already, but I'm posting here to get feedback to see if anyone feels that is wrong (like, you've created a bunch of admin aliases and can think of a better way to do this).