Find URL Alias (aka find_path) allows you to search through your sites alias listing (/admin/build/path) using wildcards allowing you to skip scrolling page by page to find the alias you want to edit. That’s it, it just adds a search feature to the already existing url alias section. It won’t actually change your aliases, make them faster or solve world hunger but what it does do, it does well.
When you first setup your drupal site having to scroll through page after page of aliases likely won’t be an issue since you’ll only have a few nodes but after a while you will end up with thousands or even millions of aliases in your site (especially if you use path auto). Clicking page by page to find one alias you want to remove is not fun and believe me, you won’t want to do that again. Just for reference this website currently has about 44 pages of url aliases - talk about needle in the haystack.
The wildcard feature when you are using Find alias is really powerful. Lets say you were searching for nodes with andrew-riley in the alias. You would enter %andrew-riley% and any node that has andrew-riley in any position as part of the alias would show up. If you just wanted to find all blogs that have the words andrew-riley in them you would just search for blog/%andrew-riley%. You don’t always have to use two percent signs, you could use zero or one depending on how you want to search. andrew-riley% would only find aliases that begin with andrew-riley so qandrew-riley would not qualify but andrew-rileyddd would.
If you are using Drupal 6 there’s no need to install this module since it’s now part of Drupal 6. For you Drupal 4 & 5 users out there, don’t worry, the module is still available for download.
The steps to get Find URL Alias working are simple:
- Download the module and unzip the file into your /sites/all/modules or /sites/{yoursitename}/modules.
- Log into your drupal site with an account that has access to add modules.
- Go to Administer -> Modules (or just type in the url of admin/build/modules)
- Scroll down to the “Other” section and click on the “Enabled” checkbox next to Find URL Alias.
To verify it’s installed and working:
- Make sure your logged in as a user who has access to the aliases.
- Go to /admin/build/path
- You should see Find Alias at the top of the page right next to Add alias.
- Click Find alias
- Enter in a search string and hit Find All
