Using nodequeue with actions and workflow module

Earl Miles also says he hasn't tried nodequeue with the actions and workflow module. I've used those modules so thought I'd put nodequeue through its paces.

I am assuming that you have installed actions and workflow module as documented earlier in this tutorial. So what we'll now do is

 

Go to admin/build/actions and look at the entries in the select list, you'll see we now have Add to Node Queue and Remove from Node Queue actions. Select Add to Node Queue and click the Add New Action button. Then you will see the following and we can select the desired nodequeue, which is Latest Stories.

 

Click Save, and then repeat the process for adding the Remove from Node Queue action. Then we should end up with the two new actions, hightlighted in red below.

 

So now we have the nodequeue actions at our disposal, we can turn to the workflow module. We need to create a workflow, define states for the workflow, then finally add that workflow to a node or node types.

Go to admin/build/workflow and click Add Workflow link.

Define the workflow name as Stories then click the Add Workflow button.

Now you will see we have the workflow and we can perform some operation on that workflow. A workflow is a series of states, probably the most simple workflow would have 2 states, on and off. For our tutorial we will use two states called Added and Expired. The idea being that we want to add stories to our Latest stories list and then change their state to expired at a chosen date and time in the future.

Let's add the states to our workflow.

Now define the transitions. I'm not going to get bogged down with the detail here, I think transition logic is self explanatory.

 

Define Workflow actions

 

Once defined it should look like this.

Make sure the workflow is defined for the Story nodetype.

 

Now let's add a Story. Once you've added a story it should appear on the queue. Also if you Edit the story you'll notice we have Workflow and Node Queue links.

Let's define an expiry time. To do this click on the Workflow link for the Story node, set Change Stories state to Removed, and Schedule for state change at (specify some datetime in the future). (It would have been nice if we could specify an elapsed time from the creation date of the node). Click submit, then once the scheduled state change time is reached the node should disappear from the node queue, (Note the scheduled transition only happens upon the next execution of cron.php).

 

That about wraps up this tutorial, please post comments if you spot any errors, or ways it can be improved. Enjoy.