Drupal clean and friendly URLs paths

Like many leading Web Content Management Systems, Drupal is especially flexible and powerful when it comes to providing administrators and content managers and publishers with the ability to easily create and maintain custom and flexible user-friendly paths and URLs/URI. Despite the typical assumption that a dynamic CMS application has to suffer from the inability to generate or accommodate the custom paths, Drupal makes it possible to match the flexibility and choice of a static, file-system-based web-site content path system while maintaining the power and flexibility of a Web Content management System.

General Requirements of a WCMS friendly path system

1. To enable content creators and optimizers to create and apply human readable URL paths that are relevant to the page content in keywords and inference.
2. Create URLs that are short and easy to remember for marketing programs and printed materials
3. Allow the creation of path aliases to enable traffic channels to be tracked by using different paths for different sources
4. Facilitate the option to create paths that mimic the file-system based URLs delimited by "/". This is useful for the migration of already established physical paths that are logical, semantic and have high pageRank
5. Make the selected paths independent of the destination GUID so that one established path can be pointed at any location, and changed as necessary
6. Ability to create more than one alias per physical content item: Especially in the migration, there are many pages that are redundant, and for the first 6-12 months, we will need to maintain 301 and 302 header redirects from many paths to one single resource

Basic features of a WCMS path alias management tool

1. Integrate with the content creation work flow to enable content publishers to select a suitable path and verify that the path does not already exist - Paths by definition of URI have to be unique, and an effective path management system has to be able to alert the publisher when he/she attempts to create a duplicate path/URL
2. The alias management tool itself will provide the option to edit and modify existing URL paths to enable the creation of paths without having to create a content object (e.g http://cmsproducer.com/nature-photography pointing to idonny.com), or to change the destination of an existing path/destination pair
3. The friendly URL has to be able to mask characters that are reserved by the web-server/Operating System to eliminate the restriction not to use "-" in friendly paths
4. The paths do not need to have file extension *.aspx, *.asp, *.php, *.htm, *.html unless the user chooses to create them or other kinds of extensions to mimic a legacy URL that is being replicated. - Ideally, all paths should be folder-level to eliminate the need for a technology specific extension that will be a liability if future choices of a CMS platform or technology. For instance, if a CMS requires the use of an extension, it will unnecessarily expose the technology in use (*.aspx, *.asp, *.php, *.htm, *.html), and if in future the site-owner chooses to migrate to a different web-server technology, it will prove unnecessarily difficult or impossible to maintain the same URLs/paths without having to translate them