[drupal-devel] install system phase 3: wizard api
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hey guys. I just had a thought regarding phase 3 of the install system (if you don't know what I am talking about, you should probably read this: http://drupal.org/node/22472). A wizard, as I have created it .. is essentially a very simple workflow tool. We want to integrate a workflow engine of some sort into Drupal for 4.7 do we not anyway? Perhaps it would be more constructive for us to focus our energies on that, and let the install wizard be driven by a Drupal wide workflow engine? - -- Adrian Rossouw Drupal developer and Bryght Guy http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) iD8DBQFCgWTLgegMqdGlkasRAktoAKC75UDcuOJJ14n9aZd9+6ziPdEg5wCglWXd ESsREO0pECSnxZ9mdTVjIvg= =Kdvk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
workflow means a lot of different things. i think you are going to have to clarify a bit. we have a workflow.module in contrib which is great, but might be unrelated to what you describe. is this what you call the 'wizard api in that post? i think wizard api is a fine name. On May 10, 2005, at 9:50 PM, Adrian Rossouw wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Hey guys. I just had a thought regarding phase 3 of the install system (if you don't know what I am talking about, you should probably read this: http://drupal.org/node/22472).
A wizard, as I have created it .. is essentially a very simple workflow tool.
We want to integrate a workflow engine of some sort into Drupal for 4.7 do we not anyway? Perhaps it would be more constructive for us to focus our energies on that, and let the install wizard be driven by a Drupal wide workflow engine?
- -- Adrian Rossouw Drupal developer and Bryght Guy http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)
iD8DBQFCgWTLgegMqdGlkasRAktoAKC75UDcuOJJ14n9aZd9+6ziPdEg5wCglWXd ESsREO0pECSnxZ9mdTVjIvg= =Kdvk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Hey guys. I just had a thought regarding phase 3 of the install system (if you don't know what I am talking about, you should probably read this: http://drupal.org/node/22472).
A wizard, as I have created it .. is essentially a very simple workflow tool.
We want to integrate a workflow engine of some sort into Drupal for 4.7 do we not anyway? Perhaps it would be more constructive for us to focus our energies on that, and let the install wizard be driven by a Drupal wide workflow engine? What do you mean by workflow?
I think a core workflow tool is a good thing, but I would reserve a name like workflow.module for what the business types mean "workflow management". Which the current workflow module, while being a good tool, is not. In any case all workflows mean some form of automation, by providing a description of "how a work can possibly done". It will be good to have such a tool in core, since it can be used for 'visual' scripting for users not coders. But it is a difficult thing to do right. The hooks system is practically a workflow kind of system. With a few careful changes and enhancements it can be used to do the job.
When you say 'workflow', Adrian, do you mean the process of 'flowing' from one step (or page) to the next in the install wizard? Because this is a very different type of workflow to what workflow.module provides. For the sake of avoiding confusion, I suggest that the steps in a wizard be called something else instead of 'workflow'. It would seem to me that if we were looking for something already in Drupal on which to base our understanding of a wizard, then we should use the pager system. The pager in Drupal is also responsible for breaking up one set of data over several pages. Although the data in question is very different (structured tabular data, as opposed to unstructured linear data), the concept of displaying one set of data over many pages is the same. I don't know what name would be appropriate for a system that does 'page paging', as opposed to pager.inc, which does table paging. Any suggestions? But I agree with Adrian that Drupal could use such a system being developed independently of the installer. The install wizard could then be built on top of the new 'page paging' API. The most obvious other application of such an API (and this is also something that Drupal could really use) would be the ability to break up the display of a node over several pages. But that's a whole new topic - if anyone has further comments on this, please start a new thread for it. Jaza. On 5/11/05, Adrian Rossouw <adrian@bryght.com> wrote:
A wizard, as I have created it .. is essentially a very simple workflow tool.
We want to integrate a workflow engine of some sort into Drupal for 4.7 do we not anyway? Perhaps it would be more constructive for us to focus our energies on that, and let the install wizard be driven by a Drupal wide workflow engine?
participants (4)
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Adrian Rossouw -
Jeremy Epstein -
Moshe Weitzman -
vlado