Please read this file and also the INSTALL.txt.  
They contain answers to many common questions.
If you are developing for this module, the API.txt may be interesting.
If you are upgrading, check the CHANGELOG.txt for major changes.

**Version Compatibility:
As of Version 5.x-2.x of Pathauto, you must use PHP4.4.x or PHP5.1.x 
or above.  Pathauto5.x-2.x has improvements for localization which 
require the use of new constructs only available in those versions.

**Description:
The Pathauto module provides support functions for other modules to 
automatically generate aliases based on appropriate criteria, with a 
central settings path for site administrators.

Implementations are provided for core content types: nodes, taxonomy 
terms, users, blogs, and events.

**Benefits:

Besides making the page address more reflective of its content than
"node/138", it's important to know that modern search engines give 
heavy weight to search terms which appear in a page's URL. By 
automatically using keywords based directly on the page content in the URL, 
relevant search engine hits for your page can be significantly
enhanced.


**Installation AND Upgrades:
See the INSTALL.txt - especially step 4.

**Notices:

Pathauto just adds url aliases to nodes and taxonomy terms. Because it's an 
alias, the standard Drupal url (for example node/123 or taxonomy/term/1) will 
still function as normal.  If you have external links to your site pointing to 
standard Drupal urls, or hardcoded links in a module, template, node or menu 
which point to standard Drupal urls it will bypass the alias set by Pathauto.

There are reasons you might not want two urls for the same content on your site. 
If this applies to you, please note that you will need to update any hard coded 
links in your nodes or menus to use the alias. Also, please bear in mind that 

For external links, you might want to consider the Path Redirect or 
Global Redirect modules, which allow you to set forwarding either per item or 
across the site to your aliased urls. 

Urls (not) Getting Replaced With Aliases:
Please bear in mind that only URLs passed through Drupal's l() or url()
functions will be replaced with their aliases during page output. If a module
or your template contains hardcoded links, such as 'href="node/$node->nid"'
those won't get replaced with their corresponding aliases. Use instead

* 'href="'. url("node/$node->nid") .'"' or
* l("Your link title", "node/$node->nid")

See http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/function/url and 
http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/function/l for more information.

Bulk Updates May Destroy Existing Aliases:
Bulk Updates may not work if your site has a large number of items to alias 
and/or if your server is particularly slow. If you are concerned about this 
problem you should backup your database (particularly the url_alias table) prior
to executing the Bulk Update. If you are interested in helping speed up this 
operation look at the Pathauto issue queue - 
http://drupal.org/project/issues/pathauto - and specifically at the issues 
http://drupal.org/node/76172 and http://drupal.org/node/67665 You can help 
provide ideas, code, and testing in those issues to make pathauto better.


**Credits:

The original module combined the functionality of Mike Ryan's autopath with
Tommy Sundstrom's path_automatic.

Significant enhancements were contributed by jdmquin @ www.bcdems.net.

Matt England added the tracker support.

Other suggestions and patches contributed by the Drupal community.

Current maintainer: Greg Knaddison (greg AT knaddison DOT com)

**Changes:
See the CHANGELOG.txt

$Id: README.txt,v 1.10.4.5 2007-08-11 14:29:26 greggles Exp $