services

Finally, after over 1 year of development the rules module has reached the 1.0 version! You can download it from the project page. Reactive rules? Reactive rules (or ECA-rules) are rules triggered upon a given event. This allows one to conditionally fire actions based on arbitrary events. As modules can provide further conditions, actions and events this enables site builders to automate a lot of things using reactive rules! As of now a lot of popular drupal modules provide already rules integration: CCK, Organic Groups, Token, Flag, Content Profile, Content Access, ViewsBulkOperations and many more. Features? The modules comes with a bunch of useful features, e.g. a flexible input evaluation system that allows to use token replacements or even PHP evaluation in your rules. To ease the management of rules the module supports tagging of rules as well as Import/Export. Often used behaviour can be put into Rule-Sets and is easily invoked by provided actions. Not enough, the execution of those Rule-Sets can be scheduled easily with help of the provided action, thus providing a powerful scheduling system, which allows you to schedule arbitrary tasks! It's finally grown-up? Rules is already stable for quite a time, however I didn't consider it to be complete. During the last months I added missing important features, fixed bugs and translation issues and completed the documentation! While there was quite a bunch of useful developer documentation for a while, now there is also a complete hook reference in the doxygen format. So it's grown up, but it's not (yet) perfect. So what comes next?

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.