Hi, I'm new here so if I'm posting this in the wrong place, let me know.
I'm accustomed to Wordpress and I find it difficult to deal with Drupal because Wordpress does a lot of the "automatic" work for me so I don't have to. And that's how it should be.
The BIGGEST issue I have right now (after having played with the development version of Drupal 7 the past hour) is the awful URL's. Seriously, they are awful for any serious SEO (even the clean URL's)...so I have to manually add an alias everytime I make a blog post, a page, etc, etc.
What Drupal needs to do is fill the value in, based on a configuration or setting. You could simply add a setting in the section where you can set the clean URL. This would minimize any errors in site organization or errors in forgetting to properly SEOize a new page/entry/etc when created. That's crucial. So crucial that it really is amazing that this isn't already part of Drupal.
I develop websites for people and I absolutely cannot hand a site over to a small business owner that knows nothing about the net & expect them to always set this setting themself everytime they add a page in the future.
For the time being, Wordpress is the CMS I need to set up for people & make themes for. But I see the power of Drupal and I really REALLY want to develop sites using Drupal.... but the average user gets confused or makes mistakes using Drupal after I've handed them a complete site. It's just not practical for business yet.
Comments
Check out the pathauto
Check out the pathauto module: http://drupal.org/project/pathauto Although there's not a release for Drupal 7 yet (since there is no official Drupal 7 yet), this module should meet your requirements.
Awesome but...
Awesome & thanks!!
but I have to ask...why is this functionality only available as a module and not in the core? Not being available as part of the initial install, is a Drupal killer. Seriously. This has been one of the main reasons some of us have kept trying Drupal & then not using it. It's crucial for SEO. Crucial....'cause URL's like /node/1 or /blog/1, just don't cut it for a business trying to get some decent placement on SERP's.
Drupal's development cycle is
Drupal's development cycle is one where once a contrib module is moved into Drupal core, new features can't be developed for it (at least not until the next version of Drupal is in development). This is why some modules will never be part of Drupal core. Their project owners want more for their projects than just bug fixes and security updates.
Drupal core provides a lot of
Drupal core provides a lot of functionality, but there are many essential contributed modules. Views, CCK, Pathauto, Token, etc. There are reasons, which I won't get into here, why some of this functionality is not in core. Part of the beauty of Drupal is the variety of contrib modules. You could also download a distribution like Acquia Drupal which contains many of the most popular and useful contrib modules.
WHile karschsp was able to
WHile karschsp was able to answer your question the drupal way, i think you may need to rethink your question to understand the why's.
You should be thinking more about what you want your urls to look like in the first place. Technically speaking, the "arguments" you're finding in the url are being rewritten and are more slick than ?q=arg0/8023f9jf03/soemthingelse/another that you might find in other CMS's or without rewriting enabled.
This being the case, you might want /content/my_first_post or maybe /products/the_best_product_for_you
You must be using drupal for a reason. Take a good look at why you're using our cms instead of another, maybe even as opposed to Ruby on Rails or Django. While Wordpress might've done a lot for you, it also did a lot without you asking, or without your premission.
correct me if i'm wrong, but path is in d7core? pathauto extends path
--
Mike Nichols
My Own Soho, LLC
mike@myownsoho.net
www.myownsoho.com
URL formatting
By the way, regarding the formatting of URLs, I recently read somewhere that using hyphens between words provide better SEO results because search engines read them as spaces and individual words where the underscore is not treated as a space by the search engines. I thought that interesting when unfortunately I recently changed my Pathauto settings to use underscores because I was trying to gain better readability in the location bar for the users. What is cool about Drupal/Pathauto is that I can batch change all of that back to hyphens. BUT I have to realize I may affect those who already linkedup/bookmarked specific pages that have the underscore. Well, pain for progress ...I can build a landing page to assist the user toward where they intended to go.
PathAuto maybe in Core of Drupal 9
Although PathAuto did not make it into Drupal 8 there is hope it will get into Drupal 9.
https://www.drupal.org/node/229568