Understanding the basics of Reaction Rules (Must Know), demonstrates the basic use of Reaction Rules by creating a simple rule configuration and explaining how Events, Conditions, and Actions work.

Displaying a message on the site (Must Know), describes the steps to be taken in order to display a custom message on the site after creating a new article.

Sending e-mail notifications (Must Know), explains how to send a customized e-mail notification to all administrators when a new user registers on the website.

Sending notifications if someone comments on a node created by another user (Must Know), explains how to send a new comment notification e-mail to a node author using replacement patterns.

Using loops and lists (Must Know), demonstrates the basics of loops and lists by creating a list of objects in Rules and executing an Action on each item.

Components – Reusing Rules, Conditions, and Actions (Must Know), explains the benefits of using Rules components by creating a Condition that can be re-used in other rule configurations.

Using the Rules Scheduler (Must Know), demonstrates the Rules Scheduler by creating a rule configuration that sends a reminder e-mail to all users who haven't signed in for a week.

Debugging Rules (Must Know), explains how to use the built-in Rules Debug feature and provides hints and best practices.

Using PHP in Conditions and Actions (Should Know), demonstrates how to use PHP input in Conditions and Actions and provides hints regarding security and usage.

Using condition groups (Should Know), describes the usage of Condition groups and the ability to combine Conditions by creating a rule configuration that sends an e-mail to the administrators if either a new article or any content type gets posted on the site that has an image field

Subscribe to comments on a node using Rules and Flag (Should Know), explains how to use Rules and Flag to send out e-mail notifications to users when someone comments on a node users are subscribed to.

Adding a Taxonomy term to a node using Views Bulk Operations and Rules (Should Know), demonstrates how to execute Rules components on a Views Bulk Operations (VBO) view and explains how to expose components for VBO to work with.

Loading a list of objects into Rules using VBO (Should Know), describes how to add a specific taxonomy term to a list of nodes using Views Bulk Operations (VBO) and Rules.

Rules Bonus Pack (Should Know), demonstrates the Rules Bonus Pack module, which 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.

Providing new Events, Conditions and Actions (Become an Expert), explains how to create custom Events, Conditions, and Actions for Rules by providing an example scenario where the number of times a view gets rendered is tracked by Rules.

Providing new entity tokens (Become an Expert), explains the basics of entity tokens and demonstrates how to create a new one that can be used in rule configurations.

Executing Rules programmatically (Become an Expert), explains how to execute Actions, Rules or rule sets programmatically by creating a new rule configuration and executing it from code.

Providing new variables for Actions (Become an Expert), explains how to modify existing or provide new variables and data for Rules in Actions by extending a previously defined Action that provides additional data to Rules after the Action is executed

Providing default rule configurations (Become an Expert), explains how to provide default rule configurations in code so that configurations can be maintained in code and version control, such as SVN or Git.

A fully functional Drupal 7 installation is needed in order to complete the exercises in this book. Also, the following modules need to be installed and enabled:

While the exercises in this book are written in a manner that aims to clearly and deeply explain each step, they presume that the reader has got basic understanding of the Drupal user interface.

This book is for Drupal site builders and developers who want to take full advantage of the Rules framework's power and flexibility.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "It is also possible to modify a default rule configuration in code. For that we could use hook_default_rules_configuration_alter() in our *.rules_defaults.inc file."

A block of code is set as follows:

/**
* Implements hook_rules_event_info()
* Define our new custom event for Rules
*/
function custom_rules_event_info() {
  return array(
    'custom_views_render' =>	array (
      'label' => 'A view is rendered',
      'group' => 'Rules Custom',
      'variables' => array(
        'view' => array(
          'type' => 'custom_view_datatype',
          'label' => t('View being rendered')
        )
      )
    )
  );
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " In the MESSAGE field, we've used REPLACEMENT PATTERNS to insert chunks of data from the objects available in our current rule configuration.".

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