[development] Help fix Actions API - test the patch!

[fago]

Am Freitag, den 20.07.2007, 11:23 -0500 schrieb Jeff Eaton:
> Actions are a way of abstracting discrete, granular tasks like  
> publishing or unpublishing a node, bookmarking a url, sending a  
> node's url to an administrator, adding points to a user's UserPoints  
> account, changing the author of a node, adding roles to a user, and  
> so on.
> 
> One application of these granular actions is mapping them to hooks.  
> (IE, whenver a node is published, do <x>.) But Actions are useful ANY  
> TIME you want to display a list of domain-specific tasks for the user  
> to choose from. Views-Actions, for example, lets you add a button to  
> any list or table view that initiates a given action. That allows  
> admins to build a no-code-required roll-your-own-content-management- 
> dashboard using a filtered view.
> 
> Quite a few places in core can benefit as well -- the node and user  
> admin screens, where we show a full list of users and a list of  
> recent content, currently implement their own custom APIs for adding  
> items to the 'what should I do with the things you selected'  
> dropdowns. Instead, we should simply list all <node actions> or all  
> <user actions> in those lists. That makes it dirt simple to add new  
> items, and for other portions of the system to reuse the code that  
> drives THAT admin panel.


> Actions.module -- the one in core that maps hook_user, hook_nodeapi,  
> hook_comment, and hook_cron operations to arbitrary actions -- is one  
> of many applications of the Actions API.

Thanks for that explanation!

So in short, modules should be able to execute actions and if I got it
right also already configured actions.

I would have another application, execute actions on workflow-ng events.
However, I think it would be better to handle action configuration
storage with workflow-ng itself, but that should be doable.


>flagged-content is an excellent example module, as well. It lets  
> users flag content as offensive, but it requires its own UI and its  
> own code for handling 'what happens after a node gets flagged.' By  
> leveraging actions, it could simply display a list of <node actions>  
> and fire off whatever ones the admin has set up.
This is an awesome idea I wasn't thinking of.. That would be really
useful, thanks. Perhaps I'll add it to workflow-ng or build a small
extension module that just generates the event when the user clicks the
link.

regards,
fago