While I've been working on the flag module's rules integration and getting the 1.0 release out, I've also fixed the details of my master thesis.
I am happy to announce to further enhance rules during my thesis. The main feature I'm going to work on is allowing rules to work with remote sites and content. I'm going build client and server-side web service support, so that several drupal sites can talk to each other. Furthermore I'm going to make it possible to invoke arbitrary SOAP-based web-services out there, maybe also others. Perhaps the right way to do achieve that might be doing rules integration for the service module. You want to invoke a web-service? - Just use the action for it. You want to create a web-service? - Just build a rule set.
Apart from that I'm going to build a readable rule export for documentation purposes, work out a basic publishing workflow and research some semantic web research capabilities. Actually I'm thinking about integrating with the RDF-API to get some meta-data about drupal objects, which is important to have in place when dealing with remote content steming from other drupal sites.
As you can see, I have some pretty nice ideas in my head. To get all that implemented in a clean way I'll probably start development of rules 2.x, so I can refactor and empower the code while retaining compatibility with the rules API introduced in rules 1.x. I also plan to add data lists and looping support for 2.x.
So the roadmap so far is:
* Release rules 1.0
* Start doing research, implement a generic rules logging module
* Start development of rules 2.x, refactor the code and integrate new features
To make sure I'll get it done right, I'm going to have an eye on these use-cases:
A) Distributed Content Deployment
Site content of a specific content type created on site A is replicated to site B by the
means of a rules based web service. So the whole content of type A including its
fields are replicated to site B.
B) Sharing a taxonomy across multiple Drupal sites
A taxonomy created on site A is replicated to site B by the means of a rules based
web service, so both sites can make use of the same taxonomy.
C) A workflow based review process
D) Rule based automated publishing and expiration of content
If you have some implementation ideas, further use cases or just any kind of feedback, don't hesitate to get in concat with me. If you are also attending the drupalcon, don't miss the BoF about rules taking place on Friday, 1:45 pm right after lunch.