Drupal Automation

Day 12/150

WixsonIT has been migrated from the shared hosting plan to the virtual dedicated server over the last few days, and has been updated from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to boot. I'm learning quite a lot about Drupal 6 in the process. In particular I'm learning that the workflow_ng module I used in Drupal 5 (played around with, is more like) has been turned into a module called Rules, and actions and triggers have been incorporated into the core of the Drupal program. It used to be that a lot of the automation you could achieve in Drupal was done with program plugins called Actions and Workflow.

So far, from what I understand, Rules is extensible, and allows for all kinds of automation not previously attainable. For instance, it integrates with CCK and Organic Groups, I presume to allow you to move stepwise through processes depending on the values of custom fields or membership in a group. I'm really interested to learn how to do those things.

I'm jumping into the deep end here. Today I watched the video on the Rules project site and did the second tutorial in the documentation, but I have yet to really grok what I'm doing.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.