rules

I've just released the first release candidate for rules 1.0. Read more at groups.drupal.org!

Finally the flag module got released - a really useful module and known as the successor of the previous "Views bookmarks" module. The project page says: Flag is a flexible flagging system that is completely customizable by the administrator. Using this module, the site administrator can provide any number of flags for nodes, comments, or users. Some possibilities include bookmarks, marking important, friends, or flag as offensive. With extensive views integration, you can create custom lists of popular content or keep tabs on important content. But even better the 1.0 (and 1.1) release is shipping with extensive rules integration. So once you have installed both modules you can create flags and use rules to add some behaviour to them, e.g. you can react once a flag is "flagged" or "unflagged" and send mail to the content node's author, unpublish it, change the content's access settings - or whatever you have actions and conditions for! Then the module also provides actions for flagging or unflagging flags, checking the flag count in case of global flags and even to "Trim flags", which allows you to restrict the number of flagged items. This way you could even create simple queues. Of course there also conditions to check whether a flag is flagged and again in case of a global flag you can check the flagging count. Amazing! Also the flag module comes with a bunch of useful settings, so you can configure the flag to have a confirmation form or to just work with an AJAX link. Together with the powerful rules integration one could implement a lot of useful stuff - want a custom link with custom permissions to publish a content node? Just use a flag and an appropriate rule!

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.

Today I held a presentation about rules at the drupalcamp in Cologne, Germany. It was really amazing to see how many people are interested into rules! You can find the slides of my presentation attached to my post. If you are interested, my presentation was also recorded. Hopefully the video is up soon - probably it'll be linked here. Thanks go to criz for taking the photo! The drupalcamp here in Cologne is a pure success! There are really interesting sessions and it's just amazing how many great people are here! I'm looking forward to the next day tomorrow. Oh Greetings from cologne!

Last Thursday I had to give a talk as part of a course at the university. I presented the reactive rules language XChange.

The BETA 2 is already more than a half year old - so a new BETA release is really long overdue. So I've worked hard during last days to get a next BETA out of the door - finally it's there! Of course there were a lot of improvements and bug fixes since BETA 2, so let me mention only the most notable ones:

• added support for an edit tab at the users page: either on the top level or as secondary tab below the "Edit" tab.
• added an extension module for integration at the registration page
• made theming with content profile easier and added content profile docs for themers
• added the possibility for admins to add content profile nodes for other users
• basic support for translated profiles with the help of the "content translation" module
• added Views integration
• added rules integration with support of upgrading from nodeprofile workflow-ng rules.
• by Gundalo and Michelle: added Panels integration
• added more usage help and hints to the README

Let's have a closer look at some points of these...

Theming with content profile

When you have a "profile-as-nodes" you probably want to use some profile information stored in your profile content in some of your themes, e.g. to show some additional information about the author of a forum post. To do so, you previously had to manually load the profile node in your theme and output the right data at the right place - yeah and not forget to properly check your data... This cried for improvements, so I tackled this problem. We need to be able to easily access the data of the created profiles, where it should be already properly prepared for use in a template so you haven't to check it yourself. Yes and we should do that fast.. So just loading all profile data and putting it into $user is really no option.

I've just released 6.x-1.0 of the content access module - yet another node access module. In comparison to the 5.x version there are quite some changes and improvements.
First off the module leverages the new permissions for content types of drupal 6: "edit any type", and "delete any type". Then consequently it makes also use of the "edit own type" and "delete own type" permissions and provides a "view own type" setting. So the 5.x "author" checkbox has been removed in favour of these role based settings. So with content access you have got the modules' settings and drupal's access permission settings. To give you a better overview about your settings content access respects and makes use of drupal's built in permissions as far as possible. Which means the access control settings provided take the built in settings of drupal into account and provide you a good overview about the really applied access control settings for a content type or content node - on just one screen! Let's show an example. If you don't grant "access content" to your anonymous users, they won't be able to do so - regardless what you would configure in content access. So the module forces the corresponding tick to be unchecked and shows you this message: Another example: If you set access control permissions for a certain content node, which is unpublished, drupal won't take your settings into account as it treats unpublished nodes in a special way. So content access warns you: Then if you use the "per content node" settings, it's now possible to reset the permissions of a content node back to the content type defaults. Apart from that there were a bunch of bug fixes for both drupal 5 and 6 versions. klausi tackled writing simpletests for content access and did an awesome job - now there is bunch of tests for both the drupal 5 and 6 version. This is really important thing to have, as access control is important to work right, right? Right!

I'm happy to announce the rules 6.x 1.0 BETA 1 release. Check out the rules project page and try it. Now the API is frozen and modules developers are encouraged to write module integration and to port their workflow-ng integration to rules. You can find the documentation here. To get token support everywhere in your actions you just have to install the latest development snapshot of it. Now basically everything is there, including support for

• firing core actions
• grouping rules in rule sets
• scheduling arbitrary rule sets
• a module input evaluation system
• and much more!

If you want to know more details about the improvements done for rules 6.x check out the development status page or the slides from the drupalcon session.

During the last days I was really busy with things like work and studying. So I had no time for the workflow-ng port "rules" for some days. Furthermore I'm going for one week to Ireland, so I won't have time during the next week either. Anyway I plan to get back working on it as soon as I'm back from Ireland. I've already ported the API and overhauled it. I've added support for rule sets and improved things, so that the API is ready for further enhancements like generic scheduling and d6 actions integration. Furthermore I've written simple tests for the API, which will be a great help during further development. As it looks like the rules API improvements take already too much time, so I won't be able to spend as much time as I'd like on the UI of the rules module. So I'll start with a more basic UI leaving the planned ajax/ahah usability improvements open for later. However if you like to help me working on that, contact me!

Actually I'm wondering what the features are that people are missing most in workflow-ng? Currently I'm starting with the 6.x port of it, the rules engine. I'll utilize this opportunity to improve the system. So if you miss anything important, let me know now! I'd also like to know your wishes! As a start, here are mine:

• generic scheduling support
• verbose mode, so that admins can track the execution of rules
• support for sets of entities
• to work with them - support for looping over these sets
• based on that support loading arguments from views
• basic variable support (strings, ..)

Yes, this all goes into the direction of a high level programming solution. Isn't it drupal's goal to eliminate the programmer? :)