How to get Page Manager to react on path alias before node/%node

Question

I have a CTools Page Manager Panels Variant that I want to apply to a whole load of different content, based on paths. Basically I want this Page Manager Page to handle all paths matching:

foo/*/*

Some paths will be node path aliases, some will be generated in other ways, i.e. not nodes.

I've set up a Page Manager Page with one Variant on the path foo/%blah/%baz, and this works well.

The problem is that if foo/bar/whatnot is a node's path alias, Page Manager sees this as node/1234 (it's menu path), and reacts with a different variant (node/%node), never considering the page page/variant I want.

My understanding of Drupal's "fitness" logic for menu router items would mean that my thing would win if the node's path alias was used, because foo/%/% has a fitness of 4, whereas node/% has a fitness of 2.

Is there any way to achieve this?

Answer 1

If you want to override the default path like node/%node, taxonomy/term/%taxonomy_term and so on then there is a module for that: Page manager existing pages. Some more details about this module (from its project page):

Page manager existing pages allows you to override/configure Drupal menu paths so you can create variants with Page manager, which is bundled in the CTools project.

Here is an introduction from the author: Overriding any Drupal path with Page manager existing pages.