Book Image

Drupal Rules How-to

By : Robert Varkonyi
Book Image

Drupal Rules How-to

By: Robert Varkonyi

Overview of this book

Rules is what every Drupal site builder and developer has to use when creating event ñ action-based applications. The framework provides a highly flexible way to create sophisticated, condition-based functions any Drupal based system into an interactive application. Rules makes Drupal rule the CMS world."Drupal Rules How-to" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the real power of the Rules framework, and understand how to use it on a site builder and developer levelThis book demonstrates the power and flexibility of the Rules framework. It discusses the main aspects of the module both from the site builder and developer perspective, from basic and advanced Rule configurations using Events, Conditions, Actions and Components to getting familiar with the Rules API. You will also learn how to use additional modules together with Rules to further extend the possibilities of your Drupal system, such as Rules Scheduler to schedule the execution of your Rule configurations and Views Bulk Operations to execute Rule configurations on a view result list. The book also demonstrates the main API features that enable you to create your own Events, Conditions and Actions, provide new data types to Rules and execute your configurations programmatically
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Rules Bonus Pack (Should know)


This recipe describes some extra Rules functionality added by the Rules Bonus Pack module. This module is a set of extensions and integrations with other modules to extend Rules to provide additional Events, Conditions, and Actions and also integrate with other modules, such as CTools.

In this example, we will act on the node view by modifying the page title to include the node's associated taxonomy terms.

Getting ready

Download Rules Bonus Pack and enable Rules Bonus: Miscellaneous.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new rule configuration, set the Event to Node | Content is viewed.

  2. Add a Condition, Entities | Entity has field, use node as the entity and select field_tags as the field to check for.

  3. Add an Action, Rules Bonus: Miscellaneous | Set page title.

  4. Use REPLACEMENT PATTERNS to modify the page title.

How it works...

In this example we've used a custom action provided by the Rules Bonus Pack module. We tell Rules to act on a node view by modifying the node's title, if it has any tags associated with it. For safety, we could also add a Condition, Data | Data value is empty, set it to node:field-tags, and check Negate to make sure we only do that if the node actually has terms.

There's more...

Rules Bonus Pack provides a number of essential extensions to the Rules framework. The following is a list of the main features:

  • CTools / Page manager integration: Rules Bonus Pack provides a bridge between the Page manager and Rules. It can provide an Event for viewing each custom page variant, which is useful when using Panels and Rules together.

    Rules Bonus Pack also provides integration with the Page manager's Access control feature. We can create condition components that can be used by the Page manager to determine whether a user can access the custom page.

  • Blocks and Theme related Actions: Rules Bonus Pack provides various Block and Theme related Actions. By enabling Rules Bonus: Block and Rules Bonus: Theme modules, we get access to various Actions, such as, placing a block in a region based on a condition or adding a custom CSS class to the body.

These recipes target developers who wish to extend Rules with their own custom Events, Conditions, and Actions. We'll also learn how to provide new entity tokens for Rules to use, how to execute rule configurations in code, and how to provide default rule configurations in our custom module.

The code snippets in these recipes are for demonstration purposes only. They are intended only to explain a specific hook or functionality and do not always provide a generic solution to a problem.