Currently, when creating repeated nodes, they are all immediately published. When utilizing an additional module like Messaging/Notifications, this can result it large numbers of messages being delivered to users. For example, if someone plans a weekly event and posts all 52 instances of it for the year via Node Repeat, 52 separate emails will be sent to each user who has enabled notifications for such an event.

The feature request is for an option to Restrict Repeated nodes from being immediately published and/or triggering notifications in some way. In addition to the problem with notifications, when multiple nodes are created, this creates a massive list of published nodes in blocks and other areas where "recent content" is viewed.

Use case example. We have a social networking site centered around Organic Groups. One of the most important components of the site is the ability for members of groups to create Events that other members will attend. Quite often these groups will meet on a regular schedule (i.e. every Thursday at 5pm). This necessitated our need for a module like Node Repeat; to make it more efficient/convenient for users to create multiple instances of a node at one time. It accomplishes that basic functionality with the problems above. We're not likely to be able to implement this as a solution because we can't trust users not to create five years of events at once and they don't want to leave the nodes "Unpublished" only to come back and publish them later.

Potentially, this module could tie into or make use of code from a module like Scheduler where a user can set a date for a node to be published.

IDEALLY, when a user creates a sequence of nodes, they could enter a time frame for each node to be published (i.e. 5 days before the date of the event).

Alternatively, options/rules could be built to work with the messaging/notifications framework such that only one message is sent out anytime a sequence of nodes are created through node repeat. This would leave problems with presentation of "recently created nodes" needing to be addressed in some way in this type of application.

Comments

gagarine’s picture

gagarine commented
Category: feature » support

I think rules should be used for that...

MacaroniDuck’s picture

MacaroniDuck commented

I understand and agree with your logic. I'm fairly new to Drupal and Rules so I might be missing something, but can you actually write a Rule that will "jump in" in the middle of your node creation sequence? My limited understanding of Rules notes that you can invoke a Rule on node creation. But how would you write a Rule that worked with this mod in that it would do one thing for the first node in the sequence, but something different for the others?

In other words, let's say that you decided you wanted the first node published, and the rest not. Is there a way to write a Rule that it would know if it was the first, second or twentieth node in a created sequence?

I know little PHP, but can grok how you'd address the "set a published date X number of days before the event date" and that could be addressed for every node, but is what I outline above possible?