Learn Rules in a day!
During this training you’ll get to know one of Drupal’s most powerful extension - the Rules module. While getting started with simple examples you’ll learn about basic concepts and tips & tricks, making your life easier. After that, we’ll dive more into the matter, learn about useful accompanying modules and leverage some more advanced Rules features like loops, lists and the Rules scheduler. Finally, it will be shown how Rules can be extended with new events, conditions and actions.
Materials provided
Handouts will help to keep everything organized during the training. Furthermore, all training exercises are made available online, including suggested solutions and features/code describing the solutions. All online material will continue to be available to attendees after the training.
Course Objectives
- Become comfortable with the Rules modules, including its more advanced features
- Get to know important modules exposing even more power to Rules
- Understand how Rules works and can be leveraged best
- Know how to extend Rules with new events, conditions and actions
All attendees must have a working local Drupal 7 environment pre-installed on their notebooks, along with everything needed to install additional contributed modules.
Warming up
- Understanding the key concepts - events, conditions, actions.
- Reacting on an event
- Understanding Rules & Entities - A true love story!
- Handling data in Rules - Common pitfalls and best practices
- Working with lists & loops
- Using Rules components with Views Bulk Operations
- Introduction to Rules Scheduler
- Sending reminders using Rules Scheduler
- Debugging Rules & Rules Scheduler
Taking off
Based on our new skills, we get to know modules that expose more power to Rules. We’ll implement some real-life use cases like the following:
- Allow users to report malicious content
- Providing custom content moderation quick links (Publish, Promote content, …)
- Automated blog post announcement on Twitter
Extending Rules
… isn’t hard - we’ll show how Rules can be extended without being a PHP expert.
- Providing conditions and actions
- Exposing new event
- Invoking Rules components from code
- Exposing entity properties to Rules
This training is targeted on experienced sitebuilders with at least basic knowledge of PHP.
Attendees should have a solid knowledge of Drupal 7, including entities, fields and views. For the coding part at least some basic knowledge of PHP, creating modules and hooks is required.
The following Rules experts from drunomics will be your trainers:
Josef Dabernig is a Drupal developer and trainer with a strong interest in Open Data and mapping - and of course a solid experience using Rules. He combined his interests in the research project AustroFeedr - a Rules-driven tool for aggregation, processing and data publishing in real-time.
In 2009, Josef teached Drupal to students in Nicaragua in a weekly course over two months. During his Drupal tours in Central America, he did more than 20 workshops in Costa Rica, Nicaragua. El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize and MĂ©xico with people of the free software community.
Wolfgang Ziegler is the creator and lead maintainer of Rules. He can provide in-depth knowledge and every way possible to extend the module, and has done numerous presentations on the module.
Besides that he is co-maintainer of Drupal core sub-systems (Form API, Entity API) and author of various contributed modules like Entity API, Field collection, Profile2 / Content Profile or Auto Nodetitle.
Christian Ziegler is an experienced Drupal sitebuilder and holds a Master of Science degree in Business and Economics Education. He is using the Rules module extensively and has been teaching various Drupal topics during the Drupal Austria Roadshow 2012 and similar events. Since 2009 he has been chairman of the Drupal Austria Association and is currently in the process of co-organizing another international DrupalCamp in Vienna.