[Phpwebsite-developers] Rules idea

[Shaun M. <sh...@ae...>]

This is an idea that's been kicking about my head for a while so I 
thought I'd let it out there.

Currently, some modules allow you to display a block, menu or other 
element if another module is on the screen. eg. you can display a menu 
with just the linkman module or a block only with announcements.

Some others, allow you to display an element depending on a pagemaster 
page - see phpwsRSSFeeds and kCart.

There are hacks from users to display blocks, menus etc depending on 
the category, if the user is an admin and other kinds of permission 
levels.

These are mostly hacked on afterwards and the interface is often 
different and confusing and mixing all the possible conditions in one 
interface isn't always simple. In an effort to homogenise these all 
into one interface, and perhaps this will fit in with v1.0.0 
permissions too,  I thought perhaps we could use a rule based method. 
The inspiration was Apple's Mail filtering rules for those familiar 
with the idea.

Here's a non-functioning mockup in html

http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk/examples/rules/

To explain,

This would be displayed instead of the 'Allow View' option in 
blockmaker for example. You click 'enable rules' to switch on the rules 
otherwise the default is to always display the element. You can add or 
remove rules using the -/+ buttons allowing quite a complex set. I've 
added some examples for common things you'd maybe filter on. The 
multi-select lists have to be generated when the user changes the 
filter type - eg. if they select category, it fills the list with 
categories, if they select pages, it fills with pagemaster pages.

That's the idea. I can see a couple of problems with it already but 
maybe they can be overcome.

1) selecting a user from a list of a couple of thousand is not viable - 
see the Notes module for how that was addressed.

2) you might want to filter on a text field - eg. pagemaster page where 
title begins with/contains 'some text'


For the core, I'd guess this is some part of layout in that it would 
keep a list of elements and if they were rule enabled or not. Or 
perhaps this is useful at a module level so that individual content is 
rule based also. A table somewhere else stores the rules.

For the module developer, it'd be as simple to add in rules editing to 
their module as they can with fatcat now.


Thoughts anyone?


Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk