Change 'edit account' URL in Drupal - drupal

Question

When going to edit account or edit profile in Drupal 7, the URL looks something like http://localhost/user/123/edit where 123 is the user id. Because of this, anyone can see how many users the site has, which I don't want. Is there a way that I can change it to something like http://localhost/user/edit or something without an ID?
I've tried setting up a menu entry in my module, that acts as the edit account/profile page, but had no success.
Also, I don't want to install a new module for this, I'd rather just write my code.

Answer 1

In theory, you could combine the Pathauto module (the widely-used module, used on over 250,000 D6 and D7 sites, which provides URL aliases for normal node and user paths, etc) with the Sub-pathauto module (a new D7 module, currently used on only a few hundred sites). The Sub-pathauto module is the only Drupal 7 module I'm aware of which will allow you to alias the user/uid part of a user/uid/edit -type path.
On the other hand, if your goal is simply to create the illusion that you might have more than a handful of users, when launching a new Drupal site, you could simply increment the UID index by adding (then deleting) a bunch of auto-generated users (with Devel generate), or since this is an auto-increment index, you could likely manually create a user entry in the database with an index of 1507 or something, and then any entry created by Drupal after that would start at 1508, even after you've removed the dummy entry from the table. (Caveat: I've never done this, but in theory it should work.)
Hope that helps. :-)

Answer 2

There is already a module that allows to do what you are trying to do, but as you want to avoid installing a module, you can create a module that contains the following code:
function mymodule_url_outbound_alter(&$path, &$options, $original_path) {
if (preg_match('|^user/([0-9]+)(/.*)?|', $path, $matches)) {
if ($user = user_load($matches[1])) {
$path = 'user/' . $user->name . $matches[2];
}
}
}
function mymodule_url_inbound_alter(&$path, $original_path, $path_language) {
if (preg_match('|^user/([^/]+)(/.*)?|', $path, $matches)) {
$uid = db_query("SELECT uid FROM {users} WHERE name = :name", array(':name' => $matches[1]))->fetchField();
if ($uid) {
$path = "user/$uid" . $matches[2];
}
}
}
This code works if usernames are unique, on your site. This is what normally happens on Drupal sites, where the username is forced to be unique; if a user tried to create an account using a username that already exist, he will get an error message.
The first hook rewrite paths such as "user/100" in "user/username," and the other hook make the inverse operation. This is necessary because Drupal expects user paths in the format "user/userid" and it would not be able to handle a user path containing the username (except when you are using a path alias).
As you are said you don't like that people can know how many users your site has, there is an easier way to avoid that. The fact people know that 123 is a valid user ID, though, doesn't mean they know how many users are registered in your site: You could have 1,000 users, 140,000 users. They just know that you could have 123 users, but if you have blocked users in your site, then some of the user IDs are not usable.
Create a user account that will never be used to log in, and create content on your site.
Editing the "users" database table increase the user ID of the account you created. Supposing that its user ID is 146, increase that number of 100.
Now, the next user that will register on your site will have a user ID equal to 247.
Increase the user ID of the dummy account you created incrementing the higher user ID.
In this way, if somebody notice that there is a user account with ID equal to 247, he will wrongly suppose you have 247 users.

Answer 3

What I did after all, was to create a hook_user_insert and to add 2 URL aliases in the urlalias table:
user/$user->uid/edit -> user/$user->name/edit
and
user/$user->uid/edit/profile -> user/$user->name/edit/profile
Hope this helps somebody.