Wasn't one of the main reasons for the pull-based forms change that you could do this sort of automation? So to, eg, create a new role, you'd pull the role_add form, populate it, and submit it? I agree that's not the most approachable API for every action, especially primitives like "create role", but it should be doable. On Sunday 20 August 2006 00:12, Angela Byron wrote:
For this volunteer project I'm working on, I'm developing an install profile. It occurs to me that there aren't really any nice ready-made functions for doing a lot of basic stuff in Drupal like:
- Creating a role, with a given list of permissions - Adding a user to a role - Enabling an input format - Turning on/off a block - etc.
I can try and roll patches for these as I go, however this is something I'm doing in my "spare" time so likely I won't have encountered even 1/100th of the possible optimizations by Sept 1, and will have time for rolling patches for very few of them, if any. And while I could create my own little helper module to define these, that means a lot of copy/paste from core which is constantly changing, so it makes sense for these changes to be in core. I could see the addition of some of these API functions also being useful for things like XML-RPC, and also for making it easier for people to create their own Drupal distributions. Erm, usability? ;)
I'm wondering if it's possible to add functions like this to the API, and change core to use them, post-code freeze? I know we normally don't allow API changes, but this wouldn't be _changing_ anything, per se.. people calling huge_gargantuan_function($op = something) would still get the same behaviour. It's just that internally, huge_gargantuan_function would be split it up into helper functions that each did distinct things.
Just curious. :) Thanks.
-Angie
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