Question

What exactly is the alias attribute of menu items used for in Joomla? In particular, are they suitable for uniquely identifying pages?

Update: I just realised that articles have alias’ as well. I think that article alias’ will be more useful

Related questions

• This is a followup of this question.

Answer 1

Alias values are used to create nice URLs for pages. There is an explanation here:

The Alias you are speaking of goes
with the Section, Category, or Article
and there is also an Alias for Menu
Item. That kind of Alias goes with the
Name of each of those objects. When
you name an Article, for example, you
can let Joomla! automatically create
the Alias. What Joomla! does is use
the same value as the name you entered
for the Article, except all of the
spaces and special characters are
removed and replaced with a dash.

Those Alias values are used to create
URLs (if you activate the SEF URLs in
your Global Configuration Utility.)

How the URL is created has to do with
the Menu Type you selected. For an
Article Layout Menu Type, your URL
will be
http://example.com/menu-alias.html

Alias’ don’t appear to be the best solution for a unique identifier as on a large enough site multiple documents might want to use the same alias. On a small site though, they can serve this purpose.