Actions and triggers (who knew?)

Posted on February 27, 2009 by agentrickard

Well, the folks who put Actions into D6 core did. But until yesterday, I had never bothered with actions. Then a client asked for the following:

For certain user roles, any new or edited posts of certain types need to be unpublished and queued for editorial review.

My first thought was: "Well, Drupal doesn't do that." But it does. Thanks to Actions. Here's a little code snippet for you, and it works.

/**
* Implements hook_perm().
*/
function custom_perm() {
$types = node_get_types();
foreach ($types as $type => $data) {
$array[] = "edit $type content without approval";
}
return $array;
}

/**
* Implementation of hook_action_info().
*/
function custom_action_info() {
return array(
'custom_unpublish_action' => array(
'type' => 'node',
'description' => t('Unpublish posts by untrusted users'),
'configurable' => FALSE,
'behavior' => array('changes_node_property'),
'hooks' => array(
'nodeapi' => array('presave'),
),
),
);
}

/**
* Implementation of a Drupal action.
* Sets the status of a node to 0, meaning unpublished,
* if created or edited by an untrusted user.
*/
function custom_unpublish_action(&$node, $context = array()) {
// If the user is allowed to edit, let them.
if (user_access("edit $node->type content without approval")
|| user_access('administer nodes')) {
return;
}
// Otherwise, unpublish.
$node->status = 0;
drupal_set_message(t('Your changes have been saved. This content
has been sent for administrator approval. Until it is approved,
this page has been removed from the web site.'));
watchdog('action', 'Set @type %title to unpublished.',
array('@type' => node_get_types('name', $node),
'%title' => $node->title));
}

And that's it. I can't believe it took me this long to exploit this feature.

And I just know that I'll learn all sorts of new tricks at DrupalCON next week, so see you there!