When I need to filter a view based on some elaborate condition, I often find myself using Drupal Views' contextual filters. Normally this kind of filter is supposed to pull the filter value from the URL, but it also lets you select other methods of finding a value if it’s not in the URL. For instance, if the filter is for the author, you can configure the view to use the current user’s ID. Even though this is very flexible, you may occasionally need filtering that cannot be set up with the available options.

Built-in Drupal pages and pages created by contrib modules have static paths that are hard-coded. An example of this would be /user where you can log in, or /node, which shows a list of recent nodes. Often times, we care about what the URL in the browser’s address bar looks like, and wish to change these. This post is a summary of three options to achieve this.