We've finished up another challenge here at The Module Off! This challenge asked you to solve a problem with producing change notifications in rules:

The Challenge

Ever want to have rules send you change notifications via email? What if you only want the email to show the differences between the old and the new? Rules doesn't have a simple or structured way to get the difference between two entities. Your mission is to fix that. For instance, let's say you've implemented a help desk ticketing system in Drupal where a support ticket is a content type. When someone updates a ticket in Drupal, (i.e. set priority from low to high), you want to send an email to the ticket's assigned user showing them the change. You don't want to send the entire ticket over again, and you don't want to have to make a million different rules with individual conditions for the individual fields.

Winner: e0ipso!

e0ipso put together some great integration between the rules and diff modules. He added a new rules action to compute the difference between two entities, and then you loop over the differences and do whatever you'd like with them. You could stick them in an email, create a heartbeat news-feed-style entity out of the tokens, whatever you'd like! Definitely check out the solution and download the module. Here's his screencast showing the module in action and a bit about how its coded.

Next Up: Node.JS

The next challenge at The Module Off has a simple title: Do Something Cool with Node.JS. We're excited to see what real-time integrations you can create with the amazingness of Node.JS. So give this challenge a whirl! There's some free WebEnabled hosting at stake!

Tags: Drupal Planet