[Framework-Team] Content rules engine bundle

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi guys,

I just wanted to tell the status of the context help bundle.

http://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/review/plip157-contentrules/

... has the Products/ and lib/ split now, and should work. Note that the 
Products/ part is actually pointless, because at the time of writing, 
the bundle consists purely of Zope 3 packages, plone.contentrules and 
plone.app.contentrules. You can use it with the existing 3.0 bundle for 
Products/.

Note that for it to work, you need a ZCML slug for plone.app.contentrules!

The bundle is fairly complete infrastructure wise. To summarise:

  - plone.contentrules, the pure Zope 3 infrastructure, is more or less 
complete and well-tested

  - plone.app.contentrules contains infrastructure that is well tested 
and more or less complete

  - it also contains a UI which is feature-complete, but needs UI work

  - it also contains conditions and actions (the elements that make up a 
rule), but at the time of writing only contains a simple test version of 
each one. Markus is on holiday now and brought his shiny new MacBook and 
the bundle, so hopefully this will be expanded! The idea is to make it 
easy to plug in new conditions and actions, so I expect these will grow 
over time as use cases present themselves.

  - there needs to be a tiny bit of integration in CMFPlone when we 
merge. This will probably just be an <include /> ZCML statement in 
CMFPlone/configure.zcml to remove the need for the slug, and then a link 
somewhere in the Plone UI to @@manage-content-rules, which is the page 
from which rules are managed.

I don't know what the status is of a formal review - Rocky said he had 
difficulties getting to it. Perhaps the above suffices, but obviously 
I'm more than peripherally involved in this bundle so I'm biased!

I would say that this is important functionality and also fairly 
low-risk integration-wise, because it requires no branch of CMFPlone, 
Archetypes or anything else (apart from the minimal integration 
mentioned above).

In theory, we could just weave it into the 3.0-lib bundle, add the ZCML 
include in CMFPlone (or not) and let it be in the 3.0 bundle as a 
"sleeper"; it'd be easy to remove again, for example. I'd prefer to see 
a full review or at least some more discussion of the code before then, 
though!

Martin