Cascade url changes to child pages

[andybroomfield]

I think this has been raised a few times, though I can't find the issues.

As our content designers and editors are rebuilding sections of our site, we find that we are having to change the path aliases of service landing and / or sub landing pages. However doing this only changes the path aliases for those pages, it does not cascade down to any page at a lower level. These have to updated by either saving the page or selecting content and bulk updating url aliases.

Mostly this relates to pages below landing and sub landing, but also applies for other parent / child types, eg. Guide overview / page, Subsite overview / page.

It would be good to have the option, when changing alias, to execute a batch operation to cascade the url change down the chain.

Considerations

• This should be opt in, possibly a confirm form, as sometimes a path change could be accidental (renaming with auto alias turned on).
• How we determine a child page? Would we trace through all the child pages, or just use the base url path and find anything underneath it.
• Should we apply these changes even if the path alias is set to manual?
• Is this performance heavy enough that it should be a background task (run on cron) instead of batch.
• Would redirects be set up automatically or do those need adding?

[andybroomfield]

Lets take a look at Pathauto Update

[andybroomfield]

An alternative is Alias Hierarchy (which from what I can tell works through the menu system).

Though I've not had much luck with either as they both have a complicated setup. Something we are looking for is that if the parent path changes, find all path aliases that start with the old path and update them to the new path.