concept

I'm happy to announce that I start working on the next generation workflow module, called workflow-ng. It's inspired by the existing workflow module, but if things go well it's going to be a lot more powerful. I can use the development as practical work for my study and I will also write my bachelor thesis about this - thanks to the Information & Software Engineering Group of the TU vienna. Furthermore it's great that this all is sponsored by the Austrian company Pro.Karriere! So, what's workflow-ng? Workflow-ng ist the next generation module package for building workflows with Drupal. It allows building configurable state machines, which can be supplied programmatically or through the admin interface. So workflow-ng will be a tool for module developers as well as for site admins. Workflow-ng doesn't work only for content nodes, it will be coded on top of a “drupal entity” - so it will start with support for nodes, comments and users. Furthermore it doesn't urge you to introduce new states for your entities,because it does interpret each saved entity as a new possible state. This allows one to reuse existing information, e.g. reuse the existing „published“ and „moderated“ fields of nodes. Also workflow-ng won't allow one building state-machines only. One will also be able to react on various “events” with configurable actions, which allows site-admins or modules to adapt any default behaviour. E.g. this suits very well for e-mail notifications. Send a thank you message to the author of a certain node type? Just configure the action and workflow-ng will do it for you. Read more about it in the concept I wrote, it's attached to this post.