How to deal with colliding aliases

Here’s a common problem with aliases:

• users/[user:name]/blog – This is a page defined by Panels. It shows a list of latest blog posts
• users/[user:name]/blog/[node:title] – This is the alias of the node that is a blog post. But if you will try to use it, Drupal thinks you refer to the Panels page, and shows you the latest blog posts, instead of the node

Here’s a short snippet, we use to easily overcome this issue.

<?php
/**
 * Implements hook_init().
 */
function my_module_init() {
  $args = explode('/', $_GET['q']);
  // Verify that the path is /users/%/blog/% and not /users/%/blog.
  if ($args[0] == 'users' && $args[2] == 'blog' && !empty($args[3])) {
    // Getting the full node path given by drupal.
    if ($path = drupal_get_normal_path(implode('/', $args))) {
      // Set the menu item to the node.
      menu_set_active_item($path);
    }
  }
}
?>

In hook_init() we check the URL and count the arguments to see if we are in a node context – in our case the node has 4 arguments, while the blog post list has only 3). The function drupal_get_normal_path() will give us a node/nid that has an alias with the pattern we checked. Using menu_set_active_item() we force Drupal to show us the node.