Drupal Rules

Day 13/150

Spent productive moments today sifting through the relatively impenetrable documentation for the Drupal Rules module. The stuff is seriously bad. Pure bloodymindedness saw me through to a modicum of understanding, to wit, I understand that to automate a task you first create a {rule set} which takes {arguments} and inside it create a {rule} which has {conditions} (but you don't use conditions here) and {actions} (which you do set up here). From the {triggered rules} section you configure the {condition} (your trigger) and {action}, which invokes the {rule set} you set up first.

I'm left frustrated, however, nagged by questions I asked in the Drupal IRC channel, but which were not answered:

Fighting my way through the Rules module documentation and I can't get my head around it, conceptually. Why do I have rules in rule sets if I can only ever address a rule set (i.e., from triggered rules) rather than a rule? Why can't I have a set of rules that deal with managing content and then build triggered rules that invoke rules within that rule set, depending on the condition?

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.