Assigning URL aliases

In create tasks, you can assign URL aliases to nodes by adding the url_alias field to you CSV file, like this:

file,title,field_description,url_alias
IMG_1410.tif,Small boats in Havana Harbour,Some are blue.,/havana_boats
IMG_2549.jp2,Manhatten Island,Manhatten is part of New York City.,/manhatten

No other configuration is required. URL aliases must start with a forward slash (/). When you run Workbench with its --check option, it will check whether each alias starts with this character, and whether the alias already exists.

Note

This method of assigning URL aliases is useful if, for example, you are migrating from another platform and want to retain the URLs of items from the source platform. If you want to assign URL aliases that are derived from node-specific field data (like title, date, taxonomy terms, etc.), you can use the Drupal contrib module Pathauto instead.

But, note also that any URL aliases created through Drupal's core URL alias functionality, which the method described above uses, is overwritten by Pathauto. This means that if you use Pathauto to create aliases, any URL aliases created by Workbench will likely not work.

You can also assign URL aliases in update tasks:

node_id,url_alias
345,/this_is_a_cool_item
367,/soisthisone

However, in update tasks, you can only assign/update the url_alias for nodes that do not already have an alias. Your update_mode setting can be either append or replace.