This article is also available in French from KolossalDrupal.com.

I need to speak to the Jedi Council. The situation has become much more complicated.

This is pretty much what I thought to myself a few weeks ago when a project I was working on presented me with an interesting problem. I had just finished importing data from an external source into Drupal when I learned that in addition to the brand-new 3,000+ nodes, we somehow also had to take into account several thousand more "aliases" for each node. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about "aliases" in the normal Drupal sense...

In this case, each imported node had the possibility of having multiple titles and each title needed to be available in various Views and discoverable via Drupal's core search mechanism. It was a requirement that we didn't just duplicate node content and give each duplicate a new title. We needed "phantom" nodes.