diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/__init__.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/__init__.py
index 6a310dd44..fdd68948e 100644
--- a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/__init__.py
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/__init__.py
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-from scrapy.contrib.spiders.crawl import CrawlSpider, Rule
+from scrapy.contrib.spiders.crawl import CrawlSpider, Rule, rule
 from scrapy.contrib.spiders.feed import XMLFeedSpider, CSVFeedSpider
diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py
index 8d4a97b08..f62cef294 100644
--- a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ import copy
 from scrapy.http import Request
 from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
 from scrapy.conf import settings
+from scrapy.link.extractors import RegexLinkExtractor
 
 class Rule(object):
     """
@@ -45,6 +46,14 @@ class Rule(object):
         else:
             self.follow = follow
 
+
+def rule(regex, callback=None, exclude=None, follow=None):
+    """Shorthand for creating CrawlSpider rules"""
+    deny = [exclude] if exclude else []
+    link_extractor = RegexLinkExtractor(allow=[regex], deny=deny) 
+    return Rule(link_extractor, callback=callback, follow=follow)
+
+
 class CrawlSpider(BaseSpider):
     """
     Class for spiders that crawl over web pages and extract/parse their links