I haven't had a
chance to look at the details of the nodeapi patch in question, but I will say
that programmatic submission of data using forms just got a bit simpler, as http://drupal.org/node/80470 was
committed. It adds a 'drupal_execute()' function that processes forms without
any of the rendering/ui cruft.
changing a node,
for example, would involve the following:
$node -
node_load(1);
$values['title'] =
'My new title!';
drupal_execute($node->type . '_node_form', $values,
$node);
It's different,
yes. But the advantage is that you will get all of the validation logic, all of
the modifications made by form_alter code (like taxonomy_defaults), and so on,
for free.
I can't offer any
insight into the actual nodeapi changes, but hopefully the above snippet helps
assuage some fears about programmatic content
changes.