[drupal-devel] install system phase 3: wizard api

[Jeremy Epstein]

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 at 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?